A snuff film is a film that depicts an actual murder, produced for general entertainment purposes.
The actual existence of snuff films has been questioned, and they have long been relegated by skeptics to the realm of urban legend and moral panic. Certainly no examples of a film of an actual murder that was created for distribution and entertainment purposes has ever surfaced. Some murderers have in various instances recorded their acts on video, however the resultant footage is not usually considered to be a snuff film because it is not made for the express purpose of generating a profit from distribution. An example is the video taken in 2001 by Armin Meiwes of the murder of Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes.
The first recorded use of the term snuff film was in Ed Sanders' book about the Manson Family murders, The Family: The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion (1971). Even there, the interview subject who described the production of said films had never actually seen such a film himself. The term "snuff" meaning death is older than that, and "snuff it", meaning to die, was used repeatedly in the film A Clockwork Orange (1971). The concept of a snuff movie subsequently reappeared and became more widely known in 1976 in the context of the film Snuff and in Paul Schrader's 1979 direction of Hardcore.
In recent years, snuff films have captured the imagination of pop culture. The Spanish horror movie Tesis (1996) revolves around a student discovering a library of snuff films hidden in a room beneath her college. 8mm (1999) is a similar movie about a private investigator hired by a widow to determine if the film her husband kept hidden in a safe is a real snuff film.
The Japanese Guineapig films are designed to look like authentic snuff films; the video is grainy and unsteady, as if recorded by amateurs. In the late 1980s, the Guinea Pig films were one of the inspirations for Japanese serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki's murders of preschool girls. The most infamous Guinea Pig film is Guinea Pig: Flower of Flesh and Blood, in which a woman, apparently drugged, is shown chained to a bed as a man in a samurai costume slowly kills her through torture and dismemberment. The film is so realistic that the FBI, acting on a tip from actor Charlie Sheen (who saw the video at a party), investigated the film, believing it to be a real murder. In an attempt to offset further criminal investigations and ease the public mind, the producers released The Making of Guinea Pig, a film made up of behind-the-scenes footage. Likewise, Italian director Ruggero Deodato was once called before a court in order to prove that a murder depicted in his film Cannibal Holocaust had been faked.
During the early 1990s, rumors spread of gay bars in Boston showing a film involving homeless teenagers, who were told that they were going to star in a porno film, running away in horror from the movie camera until they were caught up with and shot to death on camera. The Boston Herald newspaper published an article on the subject of such murder films being shown in the Boston area, Articles on the Channel 1 computer bulletin board news groups alluded to such films and claimed they were made in New York City.
A possibly credible case emerged in 2000, when an Italian police operation broke up a gang of child pornographers based in Russia who, it was claimed, were offering snuff films for sale to their clients. No such films have been found to date; it is unknown whether the "snuff film" angle to this bust was a scam by the pornographers, whose victims were unlikely ever to complain to the authorities, or a circulation-building ploy by Il Mattino, the Italian daily where the snuff charges were first reported.
The number of Internet downloads of videos depicting actual murders (e.g. the filmed decapitations of Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, Paul Johnson, Kim Sun-il, the shooting of Yitzhak Rabin, and the gun suicides of Ricardo Cerna and Budd Dwyer), plus the popularity of television programs and video releases showing actual or recreated deaths (i.e. Faces of Death, World's Wildest Police Videos—though the latter program usually edits out the more violent footage), reveals how large a market for genuine footage of murderous violence exists, whatever the context.
The early 90s video game KGB also deals with snuff films made in the then-USSR.
- Professione: reporter, a film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, contains a sequence that depicts an actual execution by firing squad.