Snuff films have made for good copy, periodically, but the FBI spent a quarter of a century investigating the films one agent calls "porn's Holy Grail" and came up with nothing in the way of real evidence that they actually exist, according to newly-released FBI files.
And it wasn't just the FBI who wanted to know if snuff films existed - legendary Screw publisher Al Goldstein once offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who could prove they existed, at least in America, and he never believed they did.
"My position has always been that there is no doubt that maybe in Latin America somebody filmed a murder," Goldstein told crime-news service APBNews.com, "but there has been no such thing as a snuff film commercially available."
In fact, the FBI files show speculation about a 1975 snuff film turning into a hot story in the New York Post, especially when the speculation seemed to come from a Hollywood Reporter writer basing it on a conversation with actor Dennis Hopper. Goldstein himself blasted back at that one.
"Anyone who bases any kind of article on the drug-induced hallucinations of a Dennis Hopper has to be stupid, and definitely deserving of a career in journalism," Goldstein said, in a comment included in the FBI files.
FBI special agent Ken Lanning told APBNews he calls snuff film the Holy Grail of porn because the bureau has hunted it a long time. "It's the ultimate thing that you can find. But no one has ever found it yet."
One of the problems seems to have been that there's never been any law passed which limits viewing of snuff films, and prosecutors might be more likely to build a murder than obscenity case, the FBI says.
But in early December 1999, President Clinton signed a ban on "crush videos" - films showing crushing small animals to death by scantily-clad women in fetish films - into federal law. There's also pending legislation in California's state Assembly to ban snuff films as well as crush videos.
The FBI has been hunting snuff films since the early 1970s. They were mostly rumored to have been produced in California, New Mexico, or South America, according to the files and other published reports over the years. The files show G-men hunting anything from newspaper articles and published rumors said to have originated with actors Dennis Hopper and Sammy Davis, Jr., but none of those rumors ever bore fruit, according to the files.
The files indicate an anonymous source tipping the FBI off to a snuff film which may have captured a 1969 murder near Los Angeles - and that Davis had developed information about the films. According to the files, no evidence ever came to light indicating Davis knew of them, but that didn't stop the rumors about snuff films from circulating widely.
A 1975 letter from an advocacy group, Citizens for Decency Through Law, charged outright that "they're" producing snuff films, showing "the torture, rape, and murder of a young girl. The torture is real. The rape is real. The murder is real." But the files show the FBI's Special Crimes Unit - which hunts violators of interstate trafficking of obscene material laws - came up with no confirmation of that claim.
Other sources, according to the files, tipped off the bureau on various occasions about snuff films. One such source killed any probe when he admitted he never saw a snuff film himself, according to the files. But the G-men probed snuff film speculation in Atlanta, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York and elsewhere, without turning up anything substantial.
The files even indicate New Orleans police wanted a copy of a snuff film to show local criminal court judges they deemed soft on porn, though the fact that snuff films were purportedly made showing acts committed outside the United States would make them difficult to prosecute, if they existed.
The FBI itself went to a 1976 showing of what turned out to be a less-than-overwhelming publicity stunt - Snuff, a 1976 film premiering in Indianapolis, Ind., billed as the bloodiest things that ever happened in front of a camera. The softcore porn film's legendary finale, a "real" murder scene, turned out to be a staged theatrical piece, according to the files.
The FBI files show, however, that in the 1980s Snuff ended up confiscated with several other S/M porn films in sting operations in Kentucky and New York.
