killing for culture: From Edison to ISIS: A New History of Death on Film

By David Kerekes

Unlike images of sex, which were clandestine and screened only in private, images of death were made public from the onset of cinema. The father of the modern age, Thomas Edison, fed the appetite for this material with staged executions on film. Little over a century later the executions are real and the world is aghast at brutalities freely available online at the click of a button. Some of these films are created by lone individuals using shaky camera phones: Luka Magnotta, for instance, and the teenagers known as the Dnipropetrovsk maniacs. Others are shot on high definition equipment and professionally edited by organized groups, such as the militant extremists ISIS. KILLING FOR CULTURE explores these images of death and violence, and the human obsession with looking — and not looking — at them. Beginning with the mythology of the so-called ‘snuff’ film and its evolution through popular culture, this book traces death and the artifice of death in the ‘mondo’ documentaries that emerged in the 1960s, and later the faux snuff pornography that found an audience through Necrobabes and similar websites. However, it is when videos depicting the murders of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg surfaced in the 2000s that an era of genuine atrocity commenced, one that has irrevocably changed the way in which we function as a society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Headpress
• Release date: Jul 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781909394353

David Kerekes

DAVID KEREKES co-founded Headpress and recently Oil On Water Press. He is author of Mezzogiorno (2012) and Sex Murder Art: The Films of Jörg Buttgereit (1994), co-author of Killing for Culture: An Illustrated History of Death Film from Mondo to Snuff (1994 & 2012) and has written extensively on popular culture.

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Sections

INTRODUCTION

Throughout the history of film, a prurient imbalance has existed between observer and observed, driving the spools in the shadowy projection box. Since the dawn of cinema, images of death and destruction have run alongside the underground trade in explicit sex. At the turn of the nineteenth century, viewing boxes, such as the Kinetoscope, were found in penny arcades and dime museums, and any other place of leisure where crowds might gather.¹ Popular testimony presents these peepshows as a form of vice, much as it would cinema that followed (and any form of popular entertainment after that). A crank of the handle provides the lone spectator with a saucy diorama, a woman dancing, perhaps. But it might also offer scenes depicting calamity or a public execution. Cecil M. Hepworth’s Explosion of a Motor Car (1900), for instance, is a blackly comic film in which the passengers of the titular vehicle are blown sky-high. A police officer assesses the damage and collects body parts when eventually they return to Earth. There is nothing comic about Execution of a Chinese Bandit (1904), however, a scene showing the actual beheading of a criminal outside Mukden, China.

There was also a vogue for period drama and the re-enactment of historic executions, with scenes of female subjects put to death among them. In Joan of Arc (1895) and The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895) we witness a grave comeuppance for two women of strength and character, perhaps indicative of attitudes toward the fledgling women’s suffrage movement at the time of their production.²

Both these films were made by Thomas Edison and his Edison Manufacturing Company. The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, at approximately eighteen seconds, is presented in the manner of a stage drama. The deposed monarch is brought to kneel at a chopping block in front of a small crowd (we have prime position) and her head unceremoniously lopped off with a swift blow of the executioner’s axe. The head (replaced by a facsimile) bounces to the floor, before being retrieved by the executioner and held aloft for the audience to see.

The ruthlessly entrepreneurial Edison, who has taken much credit for early cinema, produced many films of this stripe (essentially exploitation films). Like a proto-Andy Warhol, he didn’t do an awful lot of filming himself. But it was his name on the flag. The Cock Fight (1894), which depicts two gamecocks fighting, proved so popular the film prints were all but ruined — not uncommon for the time. In their place came Cock Fight no.2 (1894), effectively the same film with some elaboration: Two men goad each other and exchange bets behind the fighting birds, a white backdrop amplifying the action. ‘Blood sports, including rat baiting,’ concedes historian Charles Musser, ‘were popular early subjects for Edison’s camera.’³

Another popular subject was electricity. Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb, worked competitively on methods of electric power distribution for many years. One result was the electric chair, created to demonstrate the potentially lethal nature of rival AC power compared to Edison’s own DC supply. A film from 1901 covers a number of Edison’s bases, The Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison. Leon Czolgosz was the assassin of US President William McKinley, shooting him twice with a pistol in Buffalo, New York, in September 1901. Czolgosz was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death, frying in the electric chair at Auburn prison the following month.

The three-minute film opens with slow panning shots of the concrete façade of the Auburn prison complex. Fabrication takes over when next we see an interior that represents the confines of the prison itself, with an actor playing the condemned man led to his death by guards. The actor is secured to the electric chair and surrounded by functionaries giving (silent) instructions. The switch is thrown, the man jerks several times and a doctor pronounces him dead.

Edison famously recorded the execution of a much larger mammal in Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), a further effort to promote his joint ventures of film and electricity. Topsy was a circus elephant that had grown tired of the life, killing three trainers and running amok. She was tried and sentenced to death. Edison, who often gave public demonstrations highlighting the ills of alternate current by killing small animals with it, now stepped in with a death apparatus that offered a greater marketing opportunity.

Electrocuting an Elephant is a film decayed with time, having the quality of a bad dream. It begins in an outdoor space with men leading the doomed animal toward the camera. Tethered, it then kicks a free foot in anger or fear. Plumes of smoke envelop the beast and finally it topples.⁴ A reported crowd of 1,500 people gathered to watch Topsy drop dead that cold Sunday morning on Coney Island. Many more would soon have the chance. ‘As with the Czolgosz film,’ writes Mark Essic, ‘Electrocuting an Elephant was distributed across the country and watched by thousands of viewers eager to see the killing power of electricity.’⁵ Edison had wanted to film the genuine execution of Czolgosz at Auburn, but the authorities declined. Topsy is the alternative, the next-best shot. Had his request been successfully met, Edison would undoubtedly have had a tidy package on his hands. He toured The Execution of Czolgosz as part of a series of films spanning President McKinley’s career in office, culminating with his funeral cortege to Canton, Ohio. How might footage of Czolgosz’s actual execution have impacted on such a package? its exploitation? the people drawn to it? After all, this was the hand of Thomas Edison, father of the modern age.

Jump cut to February 2015. Currently making news headlines are a series of atrocities committed in Syria and neighbouring Iraq. The murders of Western and Japanese hostages, documented on camera and shared online, are public executions for the modern age committed by a militant extremist group known as Islamic State. The latest of these films depicts lone figures in a barren desert landscape and has a queasy familiarity to it. When the film ends, the fate of the kneeling figure dressed in a prisonlike jumpsuit has come to bear with callous inevitability. The head of the victim is detached and the executioner stands gloating.

This image and its digital dissemination were inconceivable a few years ago. The film and intent are a synthesis, one-part obscene publicity junket, one-part snuff film made flesh. This book looks at how we arrived at this place. It explores images of death and violence, specifically moving images, and the human obsession with looking (and not looking) at them. Locked into this obsession is the so-called snuff film, a human sacrifice before the camera sold as entertainment.

Violent spectacle has been a constant in society since the days of ancient Rome, whether the gilded actualities of Edison at the turn of the last century or the more recent vogue for ‘torture porn’.⁶ Camera phones and the Internet afford the spectacle limitless and effortless reach: our homes and offices, our news and entertainment, have become the Coliseum. Rules have changed. Film is no longer an exclusive domain, and the shadow of the snuff film has become a reality freely available at the click of a button. In 2012, Luka Rocco Magnotta posted videos of himself online torturing animals, which he followed with greater atrocities in a clip entitled 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick that eventually led to his conviction for murder.

Beginning with feature films, section one of Killing for Culture (FEATURE FILM) goes back to the 1970s and the release of a cheap exploitation movie. Snuff touted the idea that a genuine murder had taken place onscreen. Its distributor, Allan Shackleton, devised a publicity campaign that played on rumour and public gullibility to help create a modern urban myth. Several movies that followed Snuff expanded on its basic tenet. One of these, Cannibal Holocaust, spurred countless directors to make ‘found footage’ films, a genre defined by shakycam death frames. This section also comments on film as ritual, and closes with some Serbian feature films, where images of death are a catechism for a new generation of filmmaker.

Section two (MONDO FILM) is about documentary and shockumentary film. Gualtiero Jacopetti’s travelogue of cultural habits and customs, Mondo Cane, was the model for a curious cinematic lineage that emerged in the early sixties. The mondo film, as it became known, fudged fact and fiction while relying on greater shocks as it progressed through the decades. Themes of death and carnage took precedence in the Japan-America coproduction, Faces of Death, in the late seventies, and became the norm in subsequent video barrage tapes.

The market that Allan Shackleton anticipated with Snuff re-emerged with nascent video technology in the eighties. Companies like Vidimax and Wave exploited the freedom that video offered with raw, anything goes horror movies produced on a shoestring. Made to order custom tapes soon followed, providing a growing audience with faux snuff. Section three (DEATH FILM) details these custom tapes, their manufacture and consumption, while communities such as the online forum Necrobabes are symptomatic of shifting attitudes toward images of death.

Section four (DEATH MEDIA) details the transmission of violent images, from JFK’s assassination and the thrill of death defiers like Evel Knievel on live television, through to camera phones and beheading videos. This evolution is split between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, effectively the ages of television and the Internet. The book comes full circle with the chapter Ways of Seeing, which considers online atrocities as a mnemonic for the snuff film rumours of yesteryear and asks where such imagery will take us next. While terrorist groups kill on camera and upload their footage with intent to subjugate and create fear, in the case of Luka Magnotta and others the reasons for death on film are less clear.

1These machines were still in commercial use in some capacity through to the mid 1970s, maybe beyond. One author of this book used one at a funfair decamped in North Manchester, UK. The film here was a few seconds of vintage striptease before the money ran out.

2There is an unfortunate irony in that the suffrage movement features among the earliest factual shock scenes caught on camera. Newsreel footage shows activist Emily Davison throwing herself, for the cause, in front of the King’s horse during the Epsom Derby, June 4, 1913. She later died from her injuries.

3Charles Musser, film notes for the DVD box set, Edison: The Invention of the Movies (Kino 2005).

4Some years later another elephant was publicly executed. The place was Erwin, Tennessee, 1916. Reasons for the incident are no longer clear. Mary the elephant had supposedly killed a man (or men), but equally likely the execution was nothing more than a publicity stunt for an ailing circus. Mary was hanged and the event immortalized in a surreal photograph.

5Mark Essic, Edison and the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death.

6A popular strand of feature film overflowing with effusive depictions of sadism and cruelty.

Under the inhospitable California sun where sky meets sand there lies buried the origins of a despicable concept. Its exact location has long been erased by the desert wind. But it’s there, most everybody knows it.

August 9, 1969. Sharon Tate is murdered in her Los Angeles home. The actress wife of film director Roman Polanski, eight-and-a-half months pregnant, is stabbed repeatedly and left to die. Several of her high society friends and a teenage boy are also killed. The following night, ten miles away, two more people are murdered in their home in another appalling knife attack: Rosemary and Leno LaBianca. These are seemingly unmotivated crimes by unknown assailants, strange ritualistic killings of (some) famous people, with cryptic messages scrawled at each scene in blood and bodies defiled. Los Angeles is gripped with fear and the world picks up the vibrations. When dropout Charles Manson and members of his hippy followers, known as ‘the family’, are charged with the murders and go on trial in June 1970 the enigmatic Manson becomes the most dangerous man alive. Jesus Christ and the Devil as one.

This is the violent crash of the freak generation, the antithesis of ‘normal’ society whose evils are writ on a tide of high weirdness. Who knows what secrets might yet unfold in a crime that is terrifyingly nonsensical? Or what darker deed those without conscience are capable of? Perhaps, just perhaps, the killings in LA were filmed and the evidence buried? The media shakes its disapproving head at the madness, and considers a litany of what if and maybe.

You will feel the pain and you will not flinch from it, says the hippy called Satán with the piercing eyes, his voice echoing out of sync on the film soundtrack. No, the girl responds vacantly, her legs pinned to the ground at the ankles, the blade of the knife twisting at the flesh between her toes. Blood like strawberry cordial dribbles forth. The girl squirms in a manner detached. This is a scene from Snuff, a movie that is itself several clicks from reality.

In the world of motion pictures it is rare for an American distributor to welcome an x-rating. An x-rating generally means pornography. Many newspapers will not carry advertisements for x-rated pictures and the audience is restricted to those over seventeen years of age, effectively half the potential audience. In January 1976, the San Diego Union and Evening Tribune dropped its six-year ban against ads for x-rated movies. Others followed suit. Weeks later a movie appeared in New York City flaunting a self-imposed ‘X For Violence’.

Following rumours concerning the possible existence of ‘snuff’ films, and reports that one such film had been smuggled into the United States from South America, a poster appeared early in February 1976 outside the National Theater in the Times Square area of New York, specifically 1500 Broadway, 45th Street. It advertised a motion picture called Snuff that boasted ‘X for Violence’. The poster on display showed a bloodied, cut up image of a naked woman and bore the legend: ‘The film that could only be made in South America… where Life is CHEAP!’ It also promised ‘the bloodiest thing that ever happened in front of a camera!’¹

Snuff had already played briefly in Philadelphia and Indianapolis, where it premiered and where local authorities forced its departure. Performances of the movie in New York City were met by pickets, who converged on 45th Street to try and dissuade filmgoers from entering the National Theater. They waved placards and chanted Murder Is Not Amusing. Police officers served two summonses for disorderly conduct and the fraças made the New York Times: two column inches under the header ‘50 Picket Movie House To Protest Violent Film’.

The movie was a mystery. Its drawing power lay in the implication that here on film real people were dying for the entertainment of a paying public. According to the advertising pitch, this was ‘the picture they said could NEVER be shown’. Those who crossed the National Theater picket line would have seen a movie that carried no credits and had been dubbed into English, giving credence to the South American origin. What the public would not know is that prior to its release, Snuff had been a very different entity indeed, gathering dust on a New York film distributor’s shelves.

Trade for the Monarch Releasing Corporation had been predominantly pornographic up to this point, low-budget sex comedies distributed to the theatres of America. The man behind Monarch Releasing Corporation was one Allan Shackleton. Shackleton would jump on the latest bandwagon, change the title of a picture so that it fitted his latest pitch, or cut and edit dog-eared prints to squeeze from them extra mileage with a re-release. The public was eager to believe whatever line was pitched to it and Shackleton obliged, looking for any new gimmick that elevated him from the competition. Snuff was, bluntly, a terrible movie that transcended any formal notion of good or bad. The distributor of lowly sexploitation movies threw a curve ball with Snuff. It was an act of reckless abandon, but a timely one that would translate into a stroke of marketing genius.

Snuff film: By definition the killing of a human being on camera; a human sacrifice (without the aid of special effects or other trickery) perpetrated for the medium of film for commercial gain and circulated among a jaded few as entertainment.

This chapter and this book tell the story of the origin of the snuff film legend, of how it interacts with other contemporary myths and legends, most notably those inspired by Charles Manson. Allan Shackleton fused together public fears and outrageous possibility in order to create a hit film. His was the monster that had been in hiding all along, the embodiment of a diseased world.

But Shackleton barely warrants a footnote in the annals of exploitation history. He is a sketchy character and Monarch, at best, a forgotten distributor of some otherwise forgettable movies. One must dig long and hard to unearth any information about either of them.

DEATHMASTERS

Snuff started life as Slaughter,² a dire exploitation film shot in 1971 by husband and wife filmmakers Michael and Roberta Findlay. The Findlays were prodigious in the field of exploitation. Whether working apart or together, they churned out films to meet current trends in the market, so cheap it was nigh impossible they could lose any money. One early production that Michael worked on (without Roberta) was Satan’s Bed (1965), starring the unknown Yoko Ono.³ The rest is a succession of cheese and grindhouse sleaze, including roughies like Body of a Female (1964) and horror pictures like Shriek of the Mutilated (1974). Slaughter was exceptionally bad, however. It fell between the cracks. Indeed, Shackleton had almost given up on it when he got the idea to film a new ending and precipitate its release as Snuff with a scurrilous marketing campaign.

It isn’t known precisely how and when Shackleton acquired Slaughter, or when he first became acquainted with Michael and Roberta Findlay. He was certainly working with Roberta in his early years in film distribution, handling her films Rosebud (1972) and The Clamdigger’s Daughter (1974; retitled and released again as Young and Innocent). There is every possibility that Slaughter fell into his possession in the early seventies, after it had failed to secure a release anywhere else.

Slaughter was made in an attempt to exploit the Tate-LaBianca murders for which Charles Manson and his Family had recently come to trial. The Findlays were not alone in manipulating the sensational story. It seemed that every filmmaker and production company Stateside had their own Manson angle on which to hang a plot. True to their exploitation roots, some films incorporated elements of other genres, extending their market potential beyond simply an interest in Manson. In the case of the Findlays’ Slaughter, it was the biker film.

It’s important to know the place of Slaughter amid the Manson movie milieu, in order to see that it was not in itself anything particularly remote or unique. Other Manson inspired movies of the time included I Drink your Blood (1970), The Night God Screamed (1971) and The Deathmaster (1972), to name but a few. Even some existing movies that bore no direct relation to Manson were repackaged and reissued to cash-in on the case. Hippies, hippy leaders, hippy communes and hippy murder suddenly became the key ingredient of many exploitation movies. The Manson mythos also infiltrated Boris Sagal’s made for television The Movie Murderer (1970), which links a group of hippies to a spate of arson attacks. The most striking thing about this particular effort is that it is sympathetic toward the hippies, who are exonerated of all crimes in the end,⁴ a stance that undoubtedly clashed with the general consensus of the television viewing public at the time. Hysteria surrounding Manson was in full flight when The Movie Murderer was broadcast; hippies would not get off so lightly in the movies that followed.⁵

Slaughter was made in Argentina over a period of four weeks on a budget of $30,000. Michael Findlay directed and Roberta handled the camera. According to Roberta, South America was chosen as a location because producer Jack Frost⁶ wanted a vacation out of the United States. In South America life really was cheap: A film crew could be hired for just $60 a week. A common practice in low-budget films of this era was to work without synchronised sound. In this instance filming was undertaken without sound because the majority of players in the movie were locals and spoke no English. Audio dubbing took place later, back in the United States. According to an article in the Splatter Times,⁷ the Findlays initially tried to arrange a distribution deal with Joe Solomon of Fanfare Films. When he turned it down, it was screened for Allan Shackleton of Monarch Releasing.

The plot made little sense, the acting ability was nil, the gore quota was low, there was nothing much by way of action and the story constantly floundered on a point of dead halt. Shackleton also aired disinterest in the movie. But very likely he held on to a print nonetheless. The Findlays’ movie was never theatrically released in its original form. Set in Buenos Aires, there are two plot strands: The criminal exploits of a group of hippy girls led by a male called Satán, and the wiles of a glamorous, vacationing actress called Terri London. The two paths cross and the movie ends with the ritualistic murder of Hollywood’s decadent nouveaux riches in their mansion home. In this case, Terri London, her producer boyfriend, Max Marsh, and numerous hangers-on. One of the final shots shows the heavily pregnant actress caught in flagrante delicto by Satán’s acolytes, whereupon a knife is plunged toward her unborn child. It’s a mirror on the fated final moments of Sharon Tate and guests in the Hollywood Hills on the night of August 9, 1969.

It isn’t known whether the film was conceived to run much beyond this sequence. The film in its original form hasn’t surfaced and no one remembers seeing it. One must assume it did run longer because otherwise it’s a terrible ending. But then Slaughter is so shoddy none of it looks quite finished anyway. Roberta Findlay herself has remarked that it makes no sense. (For no reason, the police department in the movie is a desk located in an open field.) In their rush to get Slaughter completed and in the can, the Findlays made no attempt to fabricate a killer cult hippy story of their own and, short of using actual names, the movie relates the Manson Family Tate slaying pretty much as it had been reported. Indeed, the FBI would regard the movie as a ‘takeoff on the Charles Manson Family’ in their investigative report some months later.⁸

When Allan Shackleton decided to cash-in on the picture, however, it wasn’t as one more Manson story. He had left it a bit late for that anyway.⁹ Shackleton decided that for once maybe he could use a movie’s shortcomings to his advantage. That instead of plying the ad-line with unlikely superlatives and hyperbole, he might actually spell out to the public that here was a totally inferior work. Of course, there would need to be a good reason why the public might want to see a movie touted as inept.

Interviewed by David Nolte, Roberta Findlay says that

at that time the FBI claimed there were snuff films coming into this country. 8mm/16mm and no one to this day has ever seen one. I don’t know that they ever existed. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. Shackleton was reading the paper and said ‘Hey, that’s a great idea, that’s what I’ll call the film’. And that’s what he did.¹⁰

Shackleton acquired Slaughter for $5,000. Former Shackleton associate Carter Stevens told the authors in interview: I never saw the footage. I know Allan had bought the film for about $5,000 but it was so bad he just put it on the shelf and never released it. I don’t believe it was even screened at all for anyone.¹¹ The movie was turned on its head. Rather than playing into the hysteria surrounding Charles Manson and the Family, Shackleton instead exploited a specific and treacherous component of that hysteria.

Scrubbing all references to the Findlays’ movie, Shackleton removed the original title and credits¹² and adopted a new title — Snuff, as in ‘snuff film’.

(There was another reason why Shackleton changed the name of the film from Slaughter to Snuff, a more practical one. The title Slaughter had already been sold by Michael Findlay to Paramount to avoid confusion with a big budget studio picture by that name. Shackleton was legally bound not to use it.¹³)

The next move was to engineer additional footage (running a little under five-and-a-half minutes) and splice it onto what was left of Slaughter. For this task, Shackleton hired Simon Nuchtern, a jobbing director with a handful of not altogether remarkable movies to his name. But Nuchtern cut the trailers for many Monarch movies and was an obvious conspiratorial choice. Shackleton also brought on board Barry Glasser, a former film critic and once associate editor for the Independent Film Journal, whose role was to help with publicity on this and future Monarch releases. The input of these two men cannot be underestimated in turning the commercially redundant Slaughter into a masterclass of film exploitation. And Shackleton, hitherto a moderately successful low-budget film distributor, was ready to scratch a legend into the annals of exploitation history with a stunt comparable to the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, Orson Welles’ play that convinced 1938 America that Martians were invading Earth. Now, Snuff was primed to electrify the imaginations of a new generation, same as the old generation.

ALLAN SHACKLETON AND THE MONARCH RELEASING CORPORATION

Abalding man in his mid thirties, slim, amiable and something of a health fanatic, Allan Shackleton was a research engineer and consultant to the Department of Defense at Columbia University when he moved into a career in film. He is credited with a bit part as actor in the sex comedy Flying Acquaintances (1973), but this would appear to be his only appearance in front of the camera. Shackleton’s choice of profession was film distribution, a role at which he was adept and one he enjoyed through to his death in 1979.

Shackleton was of the opinion the public was willing to buy exploitation in any shape or form. This thinking, more than any formal training, had motivated the original film exploitation pioneers of the forties and fifties, men like Kroger Babb and Dwain Esper who sidestepped censorial powers in hawking female flesh under the guise of ‘sex hygiene’ films.¹⁴ The history of cinema, from experimental beginnings to popular art form, is punctuated by hucksterism and showmen with grandiose concepts that danced on the margin of legality. Siegmund Lubin, for instance, at the dawn of the twentieth century was carving a career in the fledging business of film, bamboozling the public into believing that his fabricated war scenes and prize fight boxing bouts were historical records of fact — or, at the very least pirated copies of much more famous films of the day. Shackleton was of a different generation to Babb and Esper and Lubin but he can be counted among their number.

We can trace Shackleton’s involvement in movie distribution to 1972, specifically Roberta Findlay’s Rosebud released in March that year, which he handled under the name Allen Shackleton Films. The company then became A.L. Shackleton Films, Inc. before the name changed again in 1973 and Shackleton plumped for Monarch Releasing Corporation.¹⁵

The Monarch office was located at 330 West 58th Street, a twenty-storey midtown residential apartment complex in New York on the busy intersection of Eighth and Ninth Avenue. The office was a converted apartment with a number of rooms providing a functional if indistinct working space for Shackleton and his administrative assistant Helen Goldberg, joined soon enough by publicist Barry Glasser. Exploitation movie posters adorned many of the walls and in one room stood a 16mm Steenbeck editing desk. A half block away was Central Park, where on most mornings Shackleton would go jogging.¹⁶

The change of name to Monarch was announced to the trade alongside the release of a new film called While the Cat’s Away (1972), a light sex comedy produced by Shackleton and directed by Chuck Vincent. It was inspired by the animated adult hit of the year, Fritz the Cat (1972). Shackleton by this point was handling some twenty-five movies in the sexploitation field with plans, he told press, to release six more by the end of 1973. Among their number was another collaboration with Chuck Vincent, Blue Summer (1973), a smutty road trip involving female hitchhikers that promised ‘Young bodies on the prowl!…THEY PAY BY THE MILE!’ Blue Summer proved a modest hit and Monarch took out a full-page ad in Boxoffice to publicize the fact. It was, the ad declared, the second highest gross in the history of the Nyack cinema in New York.¹⁷

This was only the beginning, boasted Monarch. Toward the end of 1975, Shackleton was looking to diversify. He was president of the New York based Great American Theater Inc., and in this capacity had acquired a cinema in Tampa, Florida. The small 345-seat Cine Theater, located in the Town’n’Country shopping centre, served a large Spanish American community. Under Shackleton’s direction, the bill alternated between English and Spanish language pictures (with subtitles). One might care to speculate that the South American produced Slaughter may have had a passive connection to the cinema, prior to its transition to Snuff.¹⁸ Or perhaps Shackleton had designs on playing it there? This is pure conjecture. But he certainly played other Monarch movies at the Cine: Blue Summer was screened in early July 1975.¹⁹ The Cine Theater was a family oriented establishment, Shackleton told the press, and Monarch itself was steering away from a dependence on adult oriented material, despite the formulaic success of Mrs Barrington et al. Suddenly the image for Monarch was less sex, as evidenced in the release of some rather decrepit horror pictures, Carnival of Blood (1970) and Curse of the Headless Horseman (1972). The schedule for 1976 was science fiction (Fantastic Invasion of Planet Earth [1966]), human drama (Sammy Somebody [1976]) and even a rock music concert film (Get Down, Grand Funk aka Mondo Daytona [1968]).

But at the forefront of this little revolution was something Shackleton called Snuff, the ultimate in violence.

Shackleton had a sense that x-rated films had effectively reached saturation point. Many theatres were refusing to play x-rated material and Shackleton was already editing down a number of his x-rated movies to a less explicit, more widely acceptable R-rating. He experimented first with The Cheerleaders (1973), a movie originally rated X. Re-released in August 1975 with a new R-rating it topped $3m in its first month. It’s just phenomenal, Shackleton told Boxoffice, and we’ve got September and October almost booked solid.

Shackleton followed suit with cut down R-rated versions of The Young Divorcees (1972) and Mrs. Barrington (1974), another two Monarch movies that originally carried an x-rating.

On the one hand Shackleton was breathing new life into movies that had exhausted themselves on the x-rated circuit, while on the other he was all too aware that the distributor of x-rated material had little space to manoeuvre. Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat (1972) may have caused a sensation as the first sexually explicit adult movie to play regular movie theatres, but mainstream acceptance of hardcore pornography didn’t exactly follow suit, and the so-called ‘porno chic’ anticipated by liberal minded critics was dampened by strictly enforced porno laws. Smut remained a volatile business. Shackleton witnessed some of its problems early in his own career, when the relatively sedentary Flying Acquaintances — the sex comedy in which he had an acting part — was busted in 1973 with at least one theatre manager charged with obscenity as a consequence. Mainstream pictures were given little quarter when they dared to push the envelope, as evidenced when Last Tango in Paris was judged obscene in Texarkana in 1974.

This proved a sobering influence on Shackleton, encouraging him to consider stratagems outside of his usual sex movies. The most successful of these was Snuff. Not that it was known as Snuff when Shackleton acquired it, as we have seen, nor was it quick to make a buck.

GO GET THE RIPSAW

The trailer for Snuff is simple but effective. White text on a black background scrawls slowly down the screen, which is also read out loud by a solemn male voice.

WARNING: You are about to see scenes of a film said to be the most controversial in the history of motion pictures. The movie they said could never be shown…in fact, you have read the headlines across the newspapers of this country and the world, and you have heard the news…

This is the movie that could only be made in South America where life is cheap…it will shock you and astound you…it is not meant for weak hearts…or weak stomachs…Because of the highly controversial and violent nature of this movie, we are only able to show you some selected, edited scenes at this time…but the COMPLETE, UNEXPURGATED, UNEDITED, UNCENSORED version will be coming soon to this theatre… [Quick-fire scenes of a few seconds’ duration culminating in the sight of a maniacal looking man holding offal. A piercing noise accompanies.]

Ladies and Gentlemen, the bloodiest thing that ever happened in front of the camera…SNUFF

So, what had been Shackleton’s masterstroke? What was the tagged on ending for Snuff and how did it work? Footage shot by Michael and Roberta Findlay shows an attack on Terri London in the Horst bedroom. It ends with a knife attack on the pregnant woman. The film in its new Shackleton incarnation continues to run from this point for another few minutes. The ploy was to animate the viewer into believing they were privy to something exclusive, that suddenly in this new sequence they were on a side of motion pictures usually hidden from them. Shackleton presented the extra material in the form of a behind-the-scenes cutaway, implying that here revealed were the cast and crew, complete with props, spotlights and other filmmaking equipment. The footage culminates in what appears to be the murder of one of the stage-hands, a young woman who is disembowelled before the camera. With this little film-within-a-film scenario, Shackleton was able to make good on his perverse — and perversely ambiguous — promise that here was ‘the bloodiest thing that ever happened in front of the camera’.

Such was the essence of Shackleton’s promotion. Now it could be argued that if all that had gone before in the film was a badly constructed, poorly acted mess — and it was — then there was good cause for it to be. Shackleton’s campaign implied that Snuff was a demented exposé in which the usual stuff — the movie part — was simply a prop and was unfinished, in effect the modus operandi for the final act of actual murder.

As in Slaughter, Shackleton’s Snuff opens to two groovy chicks riding down a dusty highway on a motorcycle, for an appointment with their hippy leader Satán. Except now the word SNUFF appears on the screen, with the white letters changing colour to blood red and dripping away with no hint of credits. No director, no producer and, more ominous yet, no actors. No one it seems was involved in, nor prepared to claim responsibility for, the motion picture about to unfold.

It’s a safe bet that the movie from this point runs as the Findlays had intended. Stock footage of a carnival, a murder investigation, Hollywood big shots and their decadent lifestyle, and the band of hippy girls led by Satán ride inextricably toward the final massacre. Satán and his followers storm the mansion owned by Horst, son of an arms dealer and the lover of pregnant movie star Terri London. The guests are torture-murdered. In the bedroom, attacked by the hippies with a knife, Terri’s scream ushers the end of the Findlays cut and provides a segueway into the new footage. The scream resonates on the soundtrack, when a voice offscreen suddenly yells CUT!

The scene cuts away to reveal the new material: A studio set with actors caught in the moment. Surrounding the actors are the trappings of movie making, including one archetypal bulldozing director.

The director confides to a pretty production assistant that the last take was dynamite. That was a gory scene and it really turned me on. She confesses it turned her on, too.

What follows is a stupefying descent into madness, and for the tawdry movie of the last seventy-odd minutes a contrivance as daft as it is unexpected. The director, wearing a t-shirt that bears the slogan VIVA LA MUERTE (Long live death),²⁰ begins to lean on the girl. Why don’t you and I go to the bed and get turned on… turn each other on, mm?

What about all these people watching? she asks.

Give ’em just a minute, they’re gonna be gone.

Still in long shot, still in whispers, the director and girl engage in a little light petting on the prop bed. Contrary to leaving, however, the other people in the room slowly focus their attention on the couple, including the cameraman and soundman.

Point of view of the cameraman as the couple grope and fondle; the girl’s startled face as she suddenly becomes aware that the camera is on them.

What are you doing? Are you filming this? They’re filming it!

The girl struggles to free herself from the director’s pawing. Don’t worry about it, he says.

You’re crazy!

Just move a little back up here —

You’re crazy! Scared.

— right back up here.

Let me go!

Shaddap! Then to the crew he says, Do all of you wanna get a good scene?

Cutaway to the crew and affirmation.

Okay… watch yourself… watch …

Let me up!

… watch…

Let me go! You’re crazy!

The director calls for assistance. A member of the crew expressionlessly complies, holding the girl’s arms down on the bed, while the director reaches for a knife.

You’re crazy. You’re not serious. You’re not really gonna do it, the girl pleads.

You don’t think so?

N-no.

Think I’ll kill her…

The director slices through the girl’s blouse and across her shoulder. Blood (the colour of raspberries) oozes from the wound. She writhes and hollers.

Scream, go on, scream! the director demands. That’s it, scream!

The screaming becomes a pathetic sob.

Exasperated, he bellows, STOP!! You want to play!?

More sobbing.

Ranting, the director takes from his pocket a pair of pliers and shears a finger from the girl’s hand. A pool of blood soaks the bed sheet. The cameraman, somehow managing to shoot several successive and alternating POV angles with the one camera, now zooms in for a close-up on the hand (wriggling so that the audience might appreciate that this is indeed a special effect and not anything so cheap as a simple mannequin’s hand).

Cut to the girl’s face almost on the brink of unconsciousness. Overt maniacal grimaces from the director as he barks another order. One of you guys come around and help me, will you?

Please… no more, no more, the girl moans.

Go get the ripsaw.

Please…

Out comes the electric saw, its blade detaching the victim’s hand. The director then takes his knife to the girl’s stomach. A spatter of blood, coughing, followed by silence and a not-so-cunning switch of the girl’s torso for a shamelessly shapeless mock-up. The director cuts effortlessly down to prop genitalia. The thumping of a heartbeat swells on the soundtrack. When the blade reaches the crotch, the director sinks his hand into the wound. A posthumous belly fist-fuck brings forth a handful of entrails. Moaning softly, he sinks his hand back for more. Deeper this time, deeper, pulling out the heart. Orgasmic shuddering on his part. He dips his hand in once again, clawing around. Wild-eyed and yelling, the director throws this latest fortune into the air. Freeze-frame.

The frame runs to leader-tape, then blackness. A whisper punctuates the void: Shit, shit… we ran out of film.

Another voice whispers: Did you get it — did you get it all?

Yeah, we got it all.

Let’s get outta here.

The sound of breathing. Ends.²¹

Movies that reveal the mechanics behind the filmmaking process are not unique. Each era has its own. One example of a seventies movie that offers the audience a glimpse behind the scenes is Peter Bogdanovich’s Nickelodeon (1976). It is a madcap comedy set in the maverick days of early film production that stars Ryan O’Neal and Burt Reynolds. Prior to this, and prior to Shackleton’s Snuff, is the British made Inserts (1974). Written and directed by John Byrum, Inserts is another movie like Nickelodeon set within the silent film era of 1930s Hollywood — albeit relegated entirely to a single room where a washed up director, known as Boy Wonder (Richard Dreyfuss), drowns former glories in the bottle while earning a fast buck producing stag loops. Much is made of the trappings of film production, and the tools of the trade are very much in evidence throughout. Even the title itself, Inserts, is self-referential and reiterated as a kind of mantra. It’s jargon that means footage incorporated to break up a master shot. Inserts is worthy of further investigation.

The master shot of the film within this film is rendered almost obsolete when the fading actress featured in it dies. The demise of Harlene (Veronica Cartwright) by drug overdose is not shown or caught on film, but raises little dilemma in any case: Boy Wonder is of the opinion that Harlene’s corpse should be used for what remains of the sex scenes. Ultimately this doesn’t happen and the body is begrudgingly disposed of. A substitute actress (Jessica Harper) makes up the inserts, erring dangerously close to being strangled on camera by a bonkers director.

Inserts is an interesting misfire. Looking and sounding like a stage play, it is a twisted comic eulogy about filmmaking that was shot in real-time. Released by United Artists, it initially appeared in theatres under an x-rating in the US, reduced soon afterwards to NC-17. In the opinion of your authors, there is little doubt that Inserts helped inform Shackleton in shaping the end of Snuff.²² There are many shared points of reference. Very possibly Inserts prompted him to resuscitate the Findlays’ dormant mess of a picture and release it when he did, as part and parcel of the snuff film myth that had been percolating the last few years. Unlike Insert’s impotent Boy Wonder, however, Shackleton made sure the anonymous director of his own creation would succeed in killing on camera.

MANSON IS POWER

Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry describe the case of Charles Manson and the Family as unique in the annals of mass murder.²³ No other case was quite as bizarre as this one, with numerous people conspiring to partake in ritualistic murder. Manson had dangerous philosophies relating to imminent Armageddon and an allure that attracted young dropouts, who operated guiltlessly under his command. Thus the Tate-LaBianca slayings in California in August 1969 became a rabbit hole of strange design, inhabited by misfits — whom we might consider the deadly offspring of Norman Mailer’s ‘white negro’ from a decade earlier, a generation removed in attitudes and appearance that served to undermine the very foundation of middle America.

Several books purporting to tell the true story of the crime of the century appeared shortly after the case broke. Of these, The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion (Dutton, 1971) is an anecdotal tracing of events by Ed Sanders, member of the rock band the Fugs. The prose is excitable and of a Beat nature. When events become strange Sanders’ tone is almost apologetic; when sinister or threatening he writes ‘OO-EE-OO’, as if a creep show Theremin was sounding off in the background. He is most flustered by a claim that the Family may have been involved in making ‘brutality’ films or, as Sanders later calls them, ‘snuff films.’ This aspect of the case was also the focus of a Sanders penned magazine article, which coincided with the publication of his book. ‘Charlie and the Devil’ in Esquire claimed to offer an inside scoop on the matter of human sacrifice and snuff films.²⁴

It’s not difficult to understand how such rumours took hold. The Family lived at Spahn Ranch in California, a former movie set, no less! A number of people who came into contact with Manson and his acolytes had film connections of some sort. Indeed, Sharon Tate’s husband was internationally renowned film director Roman Polanski. Polanski wasn’t present when the massacre at his Cielo Drive home took place. One who was, however, Jay Sebring, a hairdresser and former lover of Tate, had a penchant for kinky sex and supposedly procured S/M films for parties. Other persons in this elliptical orbit include a death-defying Hollywood stuntman whose speciality was authentic hangings and neckdrags (Randy Starr, who lived alongside the hippies at Spahn Ranch, was interviewed by Rolling Stone for their Manson special report²⁵), and the mysterious Lance Fairweather, a record producer of sorts, who had aspirations to make a documentary film about Manson in order to introduce the world to the man and his music. The Tate-LaBianca massacres put paid to that idea, and Fairweather, who ‘valued his anonymity as much as his life’, sold house and home and moved away.²⁶ Then there was underground experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger. In 1966, Anger embarked on an occult laden short film called Lucifer Rising, which starred a young musician by the name of Bobby Beausoleil. The project as it stood was never finished and Anger accused Beausoleil of stealing the film, or elements of it.²⁷ Meantime, Beausoleil fell under Manson’s spell, joined the Family and was convicted of the first-degree murder of Gary Hinman, ostensibly a drug related crime through which Manson inaugurated ‘Helter Skelter’, his vision of an apocalyptic race war inspired by songs of the Beatles.

When rumours of the existence of snuff films began to circulate in earnest in the mid seventies, a number of reporters played hard the Manson connection. One such reporter²⁸ was Dean Anthony of British men’s magazine Game, who speculated on the dark perversions afforded only by the ‘super rich’. In his article ‘Money is Power’,²⁹ Anthony swipes many of the less reliable witness accounts documented by Sanders and weaves them into a bloodcurdling tale of jet set depravity and excess. Thus we breathlessly leap from one passable anecdote, Manson pimping out his female followers for example, and end up swamped by monstrous accounts of hired assassins, death cults and snuff films. Snuff films are uniquely sinister, according to Anthony’s nebulous sources. They look much like regular pornography, except for the fact they culminate in ritual murder. The reason why so little is known about ‘death films’, Anthony explains, is because of fear.

The majority of investigators who worked on the Manson case shied away in horror from digging too deeply. A few were convinced that if they asked too many questions their own lives might be in danger.

Not Dean Anthony. He has no hesitation in pronouncing snuff films and their high flying clientele to be the real deal. They exist, he states categorically, alas failing to say on what basis he makes the deduction.

These non-films of Charles Manson have never been found. If they exist, posited Ed Sanders, perhaps they are buried someplace in southern California, outside the Spahn movie ranch in Santa Susana, where Manson and the Family at one time dwelled. By happy coincidence this is the same place the original Lucifer Rising was rumoured to have ended up, the film shot by Kenneth Anger and subsequently stolen, according to Anger, by Family member Bobby Beausoleil.

The expression ‘snuff’, as in snuffing someone out, was in use prior to Ed Sanders’ book, and can be traced back in popular culture to the fifties and beyond. But it took on a whole new mantle following Sanders, pertaining afresh to a murder specifically captured on film. Shackleton adopted the expression as the title of his movie. But he wasn’t the only one to appreciate the cultural ramifications inherent in the title, nor even the first.³⁰ However, he was the most important.

JAY AND PICKLE AT THE PREMIERE

Tellingly the movies based around Manson referenced earlier have no mention of snuff films, nor the film activity rumoured to have taken place within or around the Family. In the world of exploitation movies, it is inconceivable that such tales would have been ignored if in circulation at the time of production. The exception is The Movie Murderer. Completed before the Manson trial started, it alludes to the sorts of film people wandering through the legend, specifically filmmaker Kenneth Anger.³¹ But the inference of snuff only found traction years later, at around the time Shackleton was making his campaign moves.

Rumours emerged anew in late 1974, continuing to spread into the tail end of 1975. One snuff film was reputed to have been intercepted by police on its way from South America into the United States. Monarch Releasing was pitching its ad-line ‘Filmed in South America… Where Life is CHEAP!’ at around this time… And if that appears overly convenient, well, it probably is. The matter of murder and cine contraband invariably led back to the Monarch Releasing Corporation. News reports were fuelled by the tip-offs of an anonymous Allan Shackleton, feeding the media from his West 58th Street office.

But success for Shackleton didn’t come overnight. There was no hint of it when Snuff opened in Indianapolis at the Uptown Theater on January 16, 1976.³² The Uptown Theater was a somewhat unassuming venue for a world premiere, located in an area of town noted for its high crime rate. Publicity in anticipation of the film included spots on television and radio. The city’s two daily papers were wary, and both the Indianapolis Star and Indianapolis News carried ads only on the condition they contain no images and were accompanied by a disclaimer admitting that ‘This is a theatrical production. No one was harmed or injured during filming’. The ballyhoo was enough to warrant a press conference. But here Shackleton was resolute the public would have to make up its own mind whether the killing onscreen was real or not. He wouldn’t change tack until months later, when the police forced his hand, and only once did he publicly acquiesce and acknowledge Michael Findlay as director of Snuff.³³

The movie did not premiere with any of its stars in attendance (after all, they were supposed to be dead), nor did it boast any local luminaries. Not many people attended the premiere at all. Sixteen people in total turned out for the first evening show at 6pm, as reported by underground artist and journalist Jay Lynch on assignment for Oui magazine.³⁴ Lynch noted that the subsequent screening at 7.30pm drew eighteen patrons and for the performance at 9.15pm there were fourteen, comprising in the main old men in raincoats and students.³⁵ A uniformed security guard was on hand to make sure no one below the age of eighteen was admitted.

Shackleton was perturbed by the poor turnout. Lynch finds him in the lobby of the Uptown Theater after the final show, pacing nervously and ruminating on whether to cut the comparatively steep ticket price of $7.50. (When the film plays New York, entrance is a more acceptable $4.) Shackleton asks Monarch publicist Barry Glasser: What did we do wrong?

One of the very few people to attend the world premiere of Snuff, Jay Lynch agreed to be interviewed for this book. He had this to say about his experience that day:

"When I got to Indianapolis, I called a local disc jockey to get the scoop on the terrain. The deejay was pretty adamant that the theatre was in such a bad neighbourhood that I shouldn’t go there alone.

"I went to the Black Student Association at the college, and they fixed me up with a bodyguard, so that if the deejay was right, I could concentrate on the premiere without having to worry about getting hassled. The bodyguard showed up. They told me his name was Skull. When I got into his car, graffiti on the dashboard said ‘PICKLE’. ‘I thought your name was Skull,’ I said, ‘so how come it says PICKLE on the dashboard?’ ‘Oh…’ the cat replies, ‘That’s my other name.’

"The theatre was only about a third filled, as I recall. There was one crazy guy in the back row whooping and hollering at the fake snuff flick part of the movie at the end. I left Pickle in the theatre and went into the office to watch Shackleton and Glasser count the receipts. I didn’t tell them I was writing an article right off. I just mentioned the name of an exhibitor I knew in Chicago who was a mutual friend. I tried to be nondescript so they wouldn’t notice I was there. I tried to be invisible. At the end I told them I was doing the article. Glasser told me his favourite movie was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. When the article came out Glasser wrote me a nice letter."

What did Skull/Pickle make of the movie?

He almost passed out at the final scene… I consoled him and told him it was fake, though.

Of the poor attendance, Lynch said: The premiere was in an out of the way ghetto type neighbourhood and the prices were higher than the regular movies shown at that theatre. So I can see why the neighbourhood guys didn’t come. And I could see why the people from other neighbourhoods didn’t come.

Ticket price notwithstanding, Monarch stuck to their original campaign and public awareness of the movie increased. By the time Snuff left Indianapolis it was already picking up momentum. More than 300 people attended the film’s opening night at the Orpheum Theater in Wichita, Kansas, on January 30. Many of those in attendance were laughing instead of moaning, reported a theatre spokesman.³⁶ Shackleton was driving the print of the film in his car from one engagement to another on its route to New York, ballyhooing it at every turn. Having travelled from Cincinnati to St Paul, he witnessed people being turned away from the box office of the Strand Theater on the day of its St Paul premiere, February 20. Pickets and adverse press weren’t only conspiring to stop him in this instance: The theatre itself had been closed down by police the day before the scheduled screening, pending a matter of theatre licensing. The resourceful Shackleton simply packed Snuff back into his trunk and drove across the river to Minneapolis, where it played an impromptu engagement at the American Theater, fittingly an x-rated movie house, complete with ads proclaiming its ‘ban’ in St Paul.

SNUFF KILLS WOMEN — ZAP IT

The Adult Film Association of America was not happy with Snuff. Not surprising really. Formed in 1969 to protect the interests of those involved in the production, distribution and exhibition of adult motion pictures, the AFAA fought against negative representation, which included among other things child exploitation and rumours of so-called snuff films. Shackleton, hitherto a member of the AFAA, was unceremoniously kicked out of the organization because of Snuff.

Aware that it was all a gimmick and that no one was actually killed in Snuff, the AFAA nevertheless took pains to distance itself from the film. It was the sort of attention they didn’t need. President Vince Miranda, owner of the Pussycat theatre chain, announced that AFAA member theatres would not be screening it. But by and large, Snuff circumvented adult theatres anyway and played the regular houses. The AFAA unwittingly played into Shackleton’s hands when its members joined picket lines on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. We called a press conference to say the film was a phoney, recalled AFAA chairman David Friedman, and that we were proud to say we would not show it.³⁷ But the AFAA were not the only group protesting Snuff. Women’s groups were also up in arms.

We are opposed to the filming, distribution, and mass marketing of the film Snuff currently showing around the clock at the National Theater in New York City. The term ‘snuff’ has been used in the underground film circle to label those pornographic films depicting actual, cold-blooded murder of women. Purportedly a film of this type was produced in Buenos Aires, Argentina and in this film a real woman was murdered. It is implied in advertisements of the film currently showing that this may be the same film…

So read flyers distributed outside the National Theater in New York City.

Women and other persons of conscience will demonstrate at Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s offices to protest his refusal to recognize the clear and present danger of a film in this borough which purports to be a photographic recording of a woman’s actual torture and murder…³⁸

The absurdity of a theatrical motion picture that dabbled in actual murder (of a crew member, no less) was lost on some; likewise, that such a movie, supposedly having been ‘smuggled’ into the country, should turn up in New York City and openly promote itself on Times Square and around the country. It didn’t matter because lobby groups still protested against it, media still arrived to document the protestations, and officials continued to look into the matter.

But even before its release, others were eyeing the whole deal with suspicion. Harlan Jacobson, writing in Variety,³⁹ made subtle reference to the providential appearance of Shackleton’s film amid the rumour of snuff films that had been circulating for several months. Rightly so. Much rumour was emanating from the Monarch office. Critic Richard Eder of the New York Times, wrote in his review of Snuff, ‘There is a patch of anti-matter on Times Square into which not only public decency disappears, but reality as well.’⁴⁰ He went on to say, ‘Everything about the film is suspect: the contents, the promotion and possibly even some of the protest that is conducted each evening outside the box office…’

But the protests outside the National Theater, which included the presence of ‘high profile’ FBI agents, didn’t stop the movie grossing over $300,000 during its first eight weeks and it certainly didn’t halt the publicity, which shifted into gears possibly beyond the expectation of even Allan Shackleton. Snuff was a rampaging publicity monster.

When Snuff arrived in Monticello, New York,