It's not that I'm squeamish. I have an iron-clad stomach when it comes to horror films, and can even argue that Hollywood's current yen for so-called torture porn has resulted in some artistically defensible output.
I've witnessed death in real life, too. I was present when a stranger suffered a massive cardiac arrest by the side of the road and was dead within minutes, which is far too quick a passing. I also watched a family member slowly eroded by cancer over three years, which is also far too quick. Being present at the moment of someone's death though it's rarely just a moment brings with it a profound sense of life's precariousness that cannot be shaken afterwards. It cannot be captured on tape.
American journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in Pakistan in January and later executed. But, as Susan Sontag wrote: "To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have. The police killings caught on tape by bystanders in the US are evidence of wrongdoing. There's a solid case to be made that these recordings expose brutality that otherwise goes unchecked and serve the same purposes towards which journalism and documentary strive.
Still, to choose to view these videos must surely bring with it questions regarding our own role as spectators. Credit: AP. Or, as Sontag wrote in her essay Regarding the Pain of Others : "One can feel obliged to look at photographs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show.
Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience. The screen murders committed by organisations such as IS make questions of spectatorship more urgent. Commentators have remarked that these are not just killings at which a handycam happened to be present, but are deaths presented specifically for the camera.
In a sense, the camera itself is complicit in the killing. The execution of journalist Daniel Pearl in may be the founding moment for this new genre of snuff.
In other words, it's not just that a camera captured this event; it is also that the event was staged for a local and global audience, to induce, educate, incite, horrify, terrorise, train, etc. The killing happened so it would be archived as a real death on screen. Jason Middleton, an associate professor at the University of Rochester, agrees that the viewer of an execution video "is totally implicated, because such videos are an act of communication that is only realised when the intended viewer clicks play".
He cites a recent article that "pointed out that such videos play little role in how [Islamic State] or related movements speak to themselves about what they do. They are intended for foreign consumption, with specific intended effects. Brinkema says the images of military abuse in Abu Ghraib, although short of murder, still implicate viewers in a similarly compromised ethical position. Making the victims visible — capturing them in media storage as visible and vulnerable — was a specific way of enhancing pain to the subjects.
So the image of degradation, the transmission of shaming, and being photographed itself was part of the humiliation and torture. As with images of police shootings in the US, these images form a valuable record of sanctioned violence that must be held to account. Yet, argues Brinkema, "to watch those images is to close the representational loop and form the audience that was desired all along". Brinkema says the "ultimate terrible labour" of all of these images is to lay waste to any claim we might have regarding spectatorial neutrality.
Deodato released his actors from the contract and they appeared in court. One of the most notorious investigations into snuff involved Charlie Sheen and one of the infamous Japanese Guinea Pig films. In , actor Charlie Sheen came into possession of a copy of the film. He was so horrified by what he saw, and so convinced of its legitimacy that he turned it over to the FBI. The FBI and the Japanese police were already investigating the film. Ultimately, it was determined that the film was a simulation; no one was injured in the making of any of the Guinea Pig movies.
Around the same time, a British man was caught importing a copy of Flower of Flesh and Blood into the country. He was arrested for possession of a snuff film, but the court determined the film was a fake.
Over the years, multiple serial killers have been rumored to have created snuff films. Some, like Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole Lucas was convicted of three murders; Toole convicted of six; both claimed to have killed hundreds , claimed to have filmed their kills; both were pathological liars and these videos were never discovered.
Leonard Lake and Charles Ng Lake killed himself upon arrest; Ng was convicted for eleven murders and suspected of up to twenty-five , filmed themselves raping and torturing several of their victims, but never the actual murders. None were ever found. Perhaps the video that comes closest to snuff, whose existence can be confirmed, is 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick.
Perpetrated by Luka Magnotta, the eleven-minute video does not show the actual moment of death, but it shows everything else. Magnotta spent most of his life trying to become famous — or infamous. He appeared in porno films, worked as an escort, and auditioned for multiple reality shows. When all this failed, he turned to the internet to find his fame.
He found notoriety with a series of animal torture films. The video showed a perpetrator in a purple hoodie stabbing, dismembering, decapitating and sodomizing a dead body, later identified as student Jun Lin.
Viewers of the video were so disturbed by what they were watching that several notified the police. Ironically, the police dismissed the complaints, in large part due to years of chasing down what ended up being snuff hoaxes. Although his wife knows about and accepts his hobby, his coworkers have no idea what he's up to. They have ties to the Pilgrims," says SAF.
Ultimately, what they all seem to share is a compulsive curiosity about human nature and frailty, and a firm belief that the mainstream media does a disservice by censoring "what's really going on. When you hear a bomb has gone off in Moscow, we try to find those images and put them up for people who want to see. And why should we not see it? All the big gore sites have age restrictions, warnings about graphic material, and stringent policies against child pornography and bestiality.
There are taboos that still exist even in the gore world. But unlike mainstream video upload sites YouTube and Vimeo, both of which do not allow videos of violence, porn, or illegal activity, gore sites see themselves as an unvarnished reflection of life's seedy underbelly. Which is perfectly legal. It's illegal to murder somebody. It's illegal to watch somebody get murdered and not report it.
But it's not illegal to watch an online snuff film. At least not at the moment. So, in effect, if they are just showing something created by somebody else, they're not doing anything illegal. Even if that something is a murder. James Grimmelmann, a professor at New York Law School, points to the case of Craigslist, which was pressured by state law enforcement and advocacy groups to abandon its adult services ads And Craigs' public stoning may not be the end of it.
It begs the question: had Canadian Luka Magnotta and his Chinese victim been American, would gore sites — at least those run out of the States — continue to operate carte blanche? Thanks to lame reality TV, it's socially acceptable to become famous for all kinds of questionable reasons: being a mob wife or a bad teenage mom, for example. Arguably, the bar to fame has never been lower.
Could gore sites be a new, even dirtier road to celebrity for those with latent sadistic urges? Somewhat unsurprisingly, gore site fans use the "guns don't kill people" argument when addressing this question. In , for instance, two Russian teenagers were found guilty of murdering 21 people during a two month terror spree in the Ukraine. The so-called "Dnepropetrovsk maniacs" filmed several of their murders with cell phones, including the brutal slaying of year-old Sergei Yatzenko, who was pulled off his bicycle, bludgeoned with a hammer, and stabbed repeatedly with a screwdriver.
The video, named 3 Guys 1 Hammer , made it onto the gore sites, and is still widely regarded as the most shocking gore video of all time. And its existence was instrumental in the murderers' conviction at trial. Murder and mayhem have existed since the universe began.
Nations have waged wars. Religions have tortured infidels. Lovers have killed rivals. Teens have assaulted random passers by with woodshop tools.
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