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From: phil@rahul.net (Phil Gustafson)
Subject: snopes Hits the Big Time
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1993 21:56:55 GMT

This morning's edition of Metro, Silicon Valley's bargain-at-twice-theprice free paper, carries a Cecil Adams column on "snuff films" allegedy precipitated by the following two-cent letter:

Is there really such a thing as a snuff film?

--Snopes (sic), Canoga Park, Calif.

Cecil says, in a word, no. Many of the points he makes have been made on this newsgroup many times before, but he comes up with some illuminating specificities:

• The whole legend, including the use of the word "snuff", started at least as far back as 1970, when one Alan Shakleton (no relation to the Antarctic explorer) hacked up a Manson Family rip-off film called "Slaughter" to produce "Snuff in New York City". His slogan was "Made in South America Where Life is Cheap".
• "Feminist legal scholar" Catharine McKinnon insists that snuff films exist, but won't put out when pressed for confirmation.
• Ted McIlvanna, keeper of The Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality's collection of 289,000 sex movies and 100,000 videos, has seen only three on-camera deaths in 25 years of hard study. Two were accidents where not uncommon sorts of non-vanilla adventures went awry. The last was "a bizarre religious number from Morocco in which a hunchbacked kid was torn apart by wild horses while men stood around and masturbated".

He also mentions the Zapruder film, "Faces of Death", and other things already bandied about here, and comes to the same conclusion our saner old hats have: "It's not impossible that one will turn up. But the notion that [a whole industry exists] and that for 20 years they've succeeded in concealing all traces of their handiwork strikes me as absurd".

[Quotations cited under fair use; readers should buy Cecil's next book and write nice letters about him to his papers.]

My only questions are these: How much did snopes and Cecil collaborate on this bit, and has anyone ever seen the enigmatic Ed Zotti and the apocryphal David Mikkleson in the same place? And is it Cecil or some copy editor who keeps capitalizing "snopes"?

Phil "UL's at last! UL's at last!" Gustafson