Citation: Walker, Johnny (2016) Traces of snuff: black markets, fan subcultures and underground horror in the 1990s. In: Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media. Bloomsbury, London, pp. 137-152. ISBN 9781628921137 Published by: Bloomsbury URL: This version was downloaded from Northumbria Research Link: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/27964/ Northumbria University has developed Northumbria Research Link (NRL) to enable users to access the University’s research output. Copyright © and moral rights for items on NRL are retained by the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. Single copies of full items can be reproduced, displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided the authors, title and full bibliographic details are given, as well as a hyperlink and/or URL to the original metadata page. The content must not be changed in any way. Full items must not be sold commercially in any format or medium without formal permission of the copyright holder. The full policy is available online: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/policies.html This document may differ from the final, published version of the research and has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies. To read and/or cite from the published version of the research, please visit the publisher’s website (a subscription may be required.) Chapter 7 Traces of snuff: black markets, fan subcultures and underground horror in the 90s Johnny Walker This chapter seeks to explore the centrality, and significance, of underground horror films to fan cultures in the 1990s, demonstrating how a swelling interest in gory paracinema1 coincided with the emergence of an array of contemporary, direct-to-video “death films” which collated sequences of genuine human tragedy and atrocity for the purposes of entertainment. Drawing specifically on the little acknowledged Traces of Death (Various, 1993-2000) series and its producer, Dead Alive Productions, I will show how, at a time when fans went to great lengths to obtain explicit and gory exports of uncensored horror and death films, Dead Alive sought to align itself with a new breed of horror film fan, producing a series of videos that, in various ways, chimed with discourses that surrounded fan subcultures. Additionally, the chapter will briefly reflect on how the series was positioned to appeal beyond the arena of horror film fandom, reaching out to niche music subcultures, before concluding with a discussion of the legacy of the Traces of Death series in the 21st century. The elusive snuff movie had been a sporadic feature of press discourse on both sides of the Atlantic since the mid-1970s,2 but concern over its actual existence in the UK appeared to reach its apex in the early 1990s. British newspapers reported that genuine snuff films were 1 Jeffrey Sconce, “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” Screen 36, no. 4 (1995). 2 See the introduction to this collection. being traded at horror video collectors’ fairs, circulated in school playgrounds and, worse still, traded in pedophile rings.3 In the US, fears of snuff were also generating mainstream media coverage. In 1991, actor Charlie Sheen reportedly called the FBI after having watched a film in which a young woman was, Sheen believed, dismembered for real.4 However, it soon transpired that neither the British press nor Sheen was correct in their assumption. Assessing the British press reaction, Julian Petley demonstrated that the press had rather foolishly mistaken pirated versions of “video nasties”5 for something far more sinister, resulting in a situation whereby the ongoing institutional reticence towards wholly fictional horror and violent entertainment being consumed in the domestic sphere “[was] being spiced with references to the entirely mythical ‘snuff’ movie.6 As for the “snuff movie” Sheen claimed to have seen: it was soon established that this was Flower of Flesh and 3 Julian Petley, “Snuffed out: nightmares in a trading standards officer’s brain,” in Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and Its Critics, edited by Xavier Mendik and Graeme Harper (Guildford: FAB Press, 2000). 4 David Kerekes and David Slater, Killing for Culture: An Illustrated History of Death Film from Mondo to Snuff (London: Creation Books, 1995): 173. 5 “Video nasties” is a moniker given to 39 videos that were banned in Britain before the passing of the Video Recordings Act 1984: a law which dictated that all videos needed to be certified by the British Board of Film Classification prior to release. On the “video nasties” moral panic, see Julian Petley, ‘“Are we insane?” The video nasty moral panic”, 2013, http://rsa.revues.org/839. See also Mark McKenna’s contribution to this collection. 6 Petley, “Snuffed out,” 214. Blood (Hideshi Hino, 1985), the second entry in the technically accomplished, but resolutely fictional Japanese video series, Guinea Pig (1985-1988).7 Nevertheless, for all these high-profile, frenzied misjudgments, the fact that fictional horror films were being confused with genuine snuff is a significant point. Such confusion would appear to suggest that media coverage had equated the alleged underground practice of snuff production and distribution with both the makers and dedicated fan consumers of trashy, disreputable horror films. The reasons for this are clear, if ultimately ridiculous. The advent of home video in the late 1970s meant that, through to the 1990s, doors were opened for the production and transnational circulation of violent films that were unlikely to get any sort of “formal” release.8 Horror film fans swiftly began duplicating and swapping cassettes of what, at the time, were often exotic rarities from a whole range of territories. These included older, controversial films that were being sought out because of their banned status, such as the infamous Italian “mondo” films of the 1960s,9 “shockumentaries” or “death films” such as Faces of Death (John Alan Schwartz, 1978), graphically violent, realist horror fictions such as Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980), and cult gore films of 7 Kerekes and Slater, Killing for Culture, 173. See also Anon., “Snuff video shook star,” the Daily Record, 13 August, 1994, 13. 8 “Formal” is used to signify mainstream distribution that is legal and above board. “Informal,” by comparison, refers thing like piracy, and other “shadow economies of cinema.” See Ramon Labato, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution (London: BFI, 2012). On underground horror, see Steve Jones, Torture Porn: Popular Horror after Saw (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 171. 9 For an in-depth history of the original mondo cycle, see Mark Goodall, Sweet & Savage: The World Through the Shockumentary Film Lens (Manchester: Headpress, 2006). directors such as Herschell Gordon Lewis.10 Also highly desirable were more recent films such as the Guinea Pig series and a number of other gruesome films from East Asia (primarily Japan) that had been shot solely for the horror video market. The infamy of this new strain of Eastern extreme cinema derived chiefly from their unflinching and direct corporeality, a feature that was compounded in the eyes of Western audiences because so little was known about their production context.11 While these films were definitely not “snuff,”12 they certainly fell within the parameters of “schlock,”13 and their exotic qualities 10 See Randy Palmer, Herschell Gordon Lewis, The Godfather of Gore: The Films (Jefferson: McFarland, 2006). 11 Little has been written about this series in scholarship. However, for a lucid overview of the Guinea Pig series, and its distributor Japan Shock Video, see Jay Slayer, “Flowers of the Flesh,” The Dark Side no. 87, (2000):40-43). 12 While Cannibal Holocaust and Faces of Death both used sequences of genuine animal slaughter, “snuff,” in the context of this essay, is employed only in relation to the expiration of human life. 13 “Schlock” is term often used to invoke gory, and often cheap, horror and exploitation cinema. See, for example, Jeffrey Sconce, “‘Trashing’ the academy,” 6. See also Kay Dickinson, “Troubling Synthesis: The Horrific Sights and Incompatible Sounds of Video Nastes,” in Sleaze Artists: Cinema and the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, edited by Jeffrey Sconce (Durham, NC: Duke University Press): 167. It should be noted, however, that some films once dismissed on these grounds, have now been reappraised. This is certainly true of Cannibal Holocaust. See Simon Hobbs, as well as Xavier Mendik and Nicolo Gallio’s, respective contributions to this volume. See also Simon Hobbs, “Cannibal Holocaust: the paratextual (re)construction of history,” in Popular Media Cultures, edited by Lincoln Geraghty (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). and gory content, along with their informal international distribution channels, ensured that they remained intriguing to genre connoisseurs who embraced video as a means of acquiring films that were deemed out of step with mainstream (and often heavily censored) horror production. The video black market allowed for the circulation of uncut and unregulated films, with the audience often acquiring unofficial, pirate copies from underground networks of distribution, collectors’ fairs similar to those Petley discusses, or from mail-order adverts in the pages of horror-themed magazines. Indeed, it was through the indirect contact with the editor of one such American magazine, Deep Red, that Sheen’s copy of Flower of Flesh and Blood was acquired.14 As far as the British press was concerned then, it appeared that the market for horror video collectors was the same as that for genuine snuff. Horror fans, just like the elusive snuff producers, were unknown quantities, and appeared to operate in society’s darkest corners. In the US, the production and distribution of the amateur publication, Deep Red, was similarly peripheral and little-understood beyond its hardcore readership: a factor which no doubt compounded Sheen’s belief that what he was watching was a genuine snuff movie from the lower reaches of a pernicious underground.