posted 08-08-2001 06:09
NEW YORK (APBnews.com) -- Many people are sure they exist, but no one has ever seen one. They've been worried about, written about and allegedly screened by questionable movie-producing hucksters. One pornographer even offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who can prove the films exist. But despite a constant stream of stories about kidnappings, rapes and torture sessions being filmed for the enjoyment of movie audiences, 25 years of FBI investigation has failed to produce evidence of even one authentic snuff film.
"I sometimes refer to snuff films as the Holy Grail of pornography," said Ken Lanning, an FBI special agent who has investigated the snuff-film phenomenon. "By that, I mean that it is something that we've been looking for a long time. We're searching for it. It is the ultimate thing that you can find. But no one has ever found it yet."
Young women sacrificed?
The FBI's file on snuff films details its 25-year search for movies in which people may have been killed.
The FBI's snuff-film probe, detailed in a 103-page file released through the Freedom of Information Act, shows the bureau again and again hearing stories of young women being sacrificed before the camera for the ultimate in voyeuristic perversion.
To find out if there is any truth to these reports, local bureaus have been trying to track down copies of the films since at least 1975. Agents also have examined articles from major metropolitan newspapers, some of which were based on rumors allegedly originating with film stars Dennis Hopper and Sammy Davis Jr.
None of the celebrity rumors were ever proved, and the "Holy Grail" was never found.
Screw magazine's Al Goldstein, who spoke to APBnews.com from his New York offices, said this failure supports what he has been saying for years.
"They don't exist," he told APBnews.com. "I once put up $100,000 -- if anyone can come up with an American film showing a death that was made in America that was commercially distributed. My position has always been that there is no doubt that maybe in Latin America somebody filmed a murder, but there has been no such thing as a snuff film commercially available."
Lanning said he defines snuff films as a visual depiction -- photo, video or film -- of an actual human death scripted for production value and commercially distributed.
War documentaries, reality-based car-crash shows and videos such as the Faces of Death series each meet some of those criteria. But according to Lanning, such mainstream fare has never completely corresponded with his idea of a true snuff film and were not the sort of films described in the pages of the bureau's records.
Sammy and satanic rituals?
One of the first descriptions to find its way to the FBI about snuff films, or "snuffers" as they are sometimes referred to in the file, came in a 1975 letter from a public interest group called Citizens for Decency Through Law.
"They're producing snuff films now," wrote Raymond Gauer, the national director for the group. "They're called 'snuff' films because they show the torture, rape, and murder of a young girl. The torture is real. The rape is real. The murder is real."
The bureau's Special Crimes Unit, which investigated violations of interstate trafficking of obscene material laws, also known as ITOM cases, found no confirmation of Gauer's claims.
Another source told the bureau the first snuff film captured a 1969 murder believed to be committed during a satanic ritual on Will Rogers Beach near Los Angeles. The confidential contact also told the bureau that "entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. ... developed some information regarding these films."
While no evidence showed Davis knew about such a film, the rumors of such movies persisted. A file dated Feb. 10, 1975, shows that a source, whose name has been withheld, tipped the bureau to the existence of 12 or more snuff films, all shot in 8 mm format. The source undermined his case, however, when he admitted he had never seen this type of movie himself.
The files also show that snuff-film investigations surfaced in FBI field offices in Atlanta, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York and other cities, never with any resolution. The films were usually rumored to have originated in California, New Mexico and South America.
Apparently the New Orleans Police Department's vice squad wanted to get a copy of one of these films in 1975, but not to further an investigation. They allegedly want to show the films to local criminal court judges who had been soft on pornography in hopes of impressing on them the "direction in which hard-core pornography is going."
According to one of the files, Assistant U.S. Attorney Don Richard brought up a dilemma for prosecutors hoping to try these cases.
"AUSA Richard advised that due to the fact that murder takes place outside the jurisdiction of the United States, prosecution in that direction would not be possible, however, AUSA Richard advised that he feels that the producers and distributors of these films would most likely be given maximum consecutive terms on multiple counts if prosecution was entertained and convictions were obtained."
A drunken night with Dennis Hopper
Goldstein Publications
Al Goldstein
In October 1975, The Detroit Free Press ran a wire story with the headline "Latin Sex Film Ends With Actual Killing."
The story, remarkable for its lack of primary sources, quoted New York Police Department Detective Joseph Horman as saying that a writer at The Hollywood Reporter told him eight snuff films were being screened privately for $200 a ticket. A similar story, also quoting Horman, ran in the New York Post.
When the FBI questioned the detective on the story, he told them he had never heard of snuff films before the reporter got in touch with him.
A month later, on Nov. 3, 1975, Goldstein's name showed up in the files as having lashed out at the Post for writing about the films "to boost its sagging circulation, and thus inventing this non-existent type of film."
Goldstein said the Post got its story from an editor who "had spent a drunken night with Dennis Hopper."
"Anyone who bases any kind of article on the drug-induced hallucinations of a Dennis Hopper has to be stupid, and definitely deserving of a career in journalism," Goldstein concluded, according to the file.
An Indianapolis premiere
The FBI, apparently not dissuaded by either Goldstein's ranting or its own failure to turn up any snuff reels, continued to probe the existence of snuff films. The search led them, in January 1976, to take in a showing of one of the less successful film promotional gimmicks in history.
Called Snuff and premiering in the unlikely location of Indianapolis, the movie was touted by its distributors as "the bloodiest things that ever happened in front of a camera."
Among the 12 filmgoers who showed up were two special agents and a medical pathologist, sent to determine whether anyone had died in the course of making the movie. The FBI agents portrayed the movie as soft-core pornography in which a South American satanic cult roams the country performing a series of tortures and killings.
In the last segment of the film, separate from the movie's plot, the supposed real murder takes place. On the screen a male member of the film crew tells a previously un-introduced woman, "You know that last gory scene really turned me on."
Other members of the crew then restrain her while the man proceeds to slash the woman with a knife, amputate two of her fingers with bolt cutters and, finally, reach into her body and pull out her heart.
'Staged theatrical production'
Despite the attempt at gory realism, the pathologist concluded the alleged murder was nothing but "a staged theatrical production."
In fact, the bureau surmised that the director or the producer "would welcome judicial action as a vehicle for publicizing captioned film, and reportedly, he is disappointed that the matter attracted a minimum amount of publicity in Indianapolis."
The movie was distributed again in New York in February 1976, this time coupled with a documentary on the Amish of Lancaster County, Pa., and a film study on the possibilities of life on Mars.
There is no indication in the file if the New York screening was better attended, but the agents who reported on the film came up with the same conclusions: No one was murdered on camera.
The distributor ran into problems showing the film in Maryland when the state board of censors refused to give it their stamp of approval. According to an outraged letter writer, the film surfaced in 1977 in Tokyo, marketed as the real thing.
In 1987 in Kentucky and again in 1988 in New York, in sting operations that no doubt disappointed police, Snuff was confiscated along with several other sadomasochistic films.
No law banning snuff films
Unlike child pornography, there has been no law passed that restricts the viewing of snuff films. If law enforcement ever discovered a snuff film, the prosecutor would most likely build a case for murder rather than for trafficking obscene material, officials said.
There is, however, legislation currently pending in the California Assembly that would outlaw snuff films along with "crush videos," which graphically depict small animals being crushed to death.
There may be no evidence such films exist, and Goldstein's $100,000 has gone unclaimed, but Lanning says that he is still keeping an open mind.
"I can't definitively speak for what may be going on in some obscure part of the world," he said. "I can only deal with the fact that for over 25 years I've been hearing stories about snuff films, and I've literally met hundreds and hundreds of people who know somebody who saw a snuff film. There's always this one-step removed part of the story."
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