Deemed reprehensible works and suitable only for "maniacs," snuff films and mondo movies had enormous success in the 1970s and can still count on a large audience of enthusiasts, or at least people intrigued by this genre. In a too reductive manner, the "usual" film criticism has labeled these productions as trash without considering the charm that these films produce on the public; most of the spectators, pushed by the puritanism of public opinion, are led to abjure this genre of works, only to then rush to see them when they are broadcast on television.
The pioneer of the violent documentary genre of mondo movies is "Mondo cane" by G. Jacopetti in 1962, the first strong Italian documentary in which the director assembles the strangest and most disparate images he found around the world, starting from a convention of Rodolfo Valentino impersonators to the effects of nuclear radiation on men and animals, passing through Eastern cuisine based on dogs and snakes.
The film had great success, so the following year a sequel "Mondo cane 2" was released, disowned by Jacopetti because it was made by the production with the discarded footage of the first chapter.
The first true mondo movies that really show violent death in its most terrifying aspects, Jacopetti realizes with "Africa addio" in 1966, considered by many a true masterpiece. In this documentary, the director shows us various sequences of mass killings, real massacres, of animals: elephants slaughtered to recover their ivory tusks, livestock shot in the legs as retaliation against farmers; but the truly shocking images are those of the executions of prisoners of war and the terrible and unforgettable scenes of the consequences of wars between African populations of Kenya: hundreds of bodies, many of them mutilated, lying lifeless at the edges of the roads.
In 1975 we have the most famous Italian mondo: "Ultime grida dalla savana"; this documentary owes its fame essentially to two gruesome sequences: the first is the hunting of Indians by whites, who once captured the Indios let themselves go to the most ferocious violence including castrations, decapitations, and scalping; the second is the scene of the tragic end of Pit Doenitz, a tourist who during a trip to the natural park of Wallase had the "brilliant" idea of venturing outside the jeep to photograph the lions up close, and ends up torn apart by them. The various sequences of his useless struggling in the beasts' jaws and his dismemberment were filmed by the other tourists, unable to help him. There is, however, a great difference between the scene of the Indios and this last one: in fact, while the first is the product of excellent special effects, the second are real images, to which only some brief splatter details have been added.
But the apotheosis of the mondo movies genre is reached by C. Le Cilaire creating the saga known as "Faces of Death," which boasts up to four chapters today, where we are presented with sequences of violent deaths, executions, and tortures. The scenes represented in these films are, however, mostly creations of special effects, and the charm of this genre, i.e., witnessing violent but especially real scenes, is somewhat lost.
Leaving aside the mondo documentaries, let's now address the chapter of snuff films, even richer in films and examples of splatter.
Strangely but truly, the film that ideally acts as a link between snuff themes and mondo-movies is a beautiful western titled "Soldier Blue" by Ralph Nelson (1970) in which, during the final sequence where we witness the attack of American soldiers on a Cheyenne village, we are shown sequences that, for their cruelty and absolute verisimilitude to reality, can be calmly compared to the hardest images of snuff films: women tortured and horribly mutilated, children decapitated, massacres of masses, and young people with legs and limbs amputated. All this in a sparse style that wants to be a true portrait of reality and that in part is, because the film tells us a fact that actually happened during the time of the conquest of the West by the United States Army and that is remembered by historians as one of the darkest chapters of American history.
In 1974, the duo Michael and Roberta Findlay make "Snuff" a co-production between the United States and Argentina; the film, inspired by the exploits of the Manson family, owes its fame to the atrocious final scene in which we witness the torture of a girl who, in a film studio, is savagely tortured, mutilated, dismembered, and quartered. In the advertising campaign used to launch the film, this scene was passed off as real, saying that the woman was an Argentine actress who, convinced she had been hired for a normal hard film, was unaware she was going to the slaughterhouse. The matter was never verified, not even in a penal court. For these reasons, the film was blocked almost immediately after its release and had a limited distribution, becoming a cult immediately.
In its wake, we have the subsequent "Emanuelle in America," directed by our Joe D'Amato in 1976, in which we follow the adventures of the fascinating photographer Emanuelle, played by Laura Gemser, dealing with an investigation into the world of sexual perversions, which leads her to the discovery of the existence of infamous snuff films showing scenes of torture and violence on defenseless young women perpetrated by some men in uniform (military or police): breasts cut off, hooks planted in the belly, rapes with enormous wooden phalluses, we really witness a delirium of horrors. Again, in a subsequent film, D'Amato addresses these themes again; in "Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali," in 1977 always played by Gemser, in which a 8mm film of anthropological content, but very gruesome, is shown to the protagonist, in which we see the evisceration of a man who is then suffocated with his own penis, and the decapitation of a woman whose eyes are then eaten; these are rituals and punishments that African tribes reserved for adulterers. The film shot in realistic and vivid black and white reminds us of the most famous sequences of the mondo.
But undoubtedly the most important and famous film of this genre remains the unsurpassed "Cannibal Holocaust" by Ruggero Deodato, in 1979, the true cult of the snuff genre known worldwide.
The story tells of the discovery in the deepest Amazon, by an anthropologist, of a film shot by a previous crew of photographers, mysteriously disappeared a few days earlier, whose traces the scholar was following to discover their end. Back from the trip, the anthropologist analyzes the content of the film opening a door to horror: we see how the group of young researchers, once they found the tribes of Indians, realize that these no longer practice the savage cannibal customs but have instead become peaceful; annoyed by the fact that they can no longer shoot a shocking film about cannibals, the young people first try to provoke the natives to then actually resort to violence, raping defenseless women and committing all kinds of violence on men and animals; they will be rewarded as they wanted, the savages return to their old customs by attacking the boys and eating them while they are still alive. The scenes are really disturbing and very realistic to the point of making one suspect that they were real, creating no few problems for the director who had to defend himself from the accusations of having shot real cannibal rituals; it was naturally ascertained that the sequences in question were pure fiction, but also that the scenes of violence on animals were real, making the actors and the director risk jail; they managed to save themselves by basing their defense on the fact that the killings and mutilations of animals were emulated, with a documentary spirit, from the uses of the local indigenous people who, once the shootings were over, always ate the animals killed.
Worthy of note in the cast is a young Luca Barbareschi who now boasts of being a man of extreme artistic sensitivity but who at that time did not hesitate to disembowel live animals in front of the cameras!
Almost contemporary is "Hardcore" by Paul Scharder, the story of a mid-life industrialist who sets out on the trail of his daughter who ran away from home and ended up making porn films; his descent into the hell of prostitution and the porn world leads him to the discovery of the existence of snuff films, which are shot in a squalid back room by a man without scruples and by young women in desperate need of money. His young daughter is saved by the detective hired by the father, just as she was about to be killed in the scene of a snuff.
In 1981 we have another important example of a blend of fiction and reality in "Virus" by Bruno Mattei: the film is the usual story of zombies, in which however we witness between the splatter scenes sequences "stolen" from the mondo movies "New Guinea, the island of cannibals."
Even the following year, in 1982, another great director, David Cronenberg, decides to tackle the "myth" of snuff films, and he does it as usual in an original way; in "Videodrome" we follow the adventures of the owner of a small private TV station, played by a magnificent James Woods, who discovers the existence of a private broadcaster that broadcasts scenes of violence and murder live; fascinated by these scenes and at the same time interested in the economic profit that could derive from broadcasting these films, he tries to track down their source. Meanwhile, however, his mind is disturbed by the continuous visions of those images of violence, to the point that he no longer knows how to recognize the difference between reality and fiction, no longer knows whether he dreams of killing and raping women or if he really does it; he will end up committing suicide now completely crazy.
The same year, Umberto Lenzi directs "Cannibal Ferox," a shameless imitation of Deodato's cult film, which, however, does not have either the artistic quality or the expressive power, remaining pervaded by a sense of déjà vu. Only some excellent splatter sequences (including the one in which a young woman is suspended in mid-air, hanging by her breasts, through two enormous hooks) and the praiseworthy special effects are worth saving.
Mandatory mentions also for "Fatal Frames" by Al Festa, of which we can remember the scene in which a man forces a child to watch a snuff film, a scene that you will never see broadcast on TV, and for "The Brave" with Johnny Depp and Marlon Brando in which, however, we do not witness any crude scene typical of this genre, everything is left to the imagination of the spectators (a real shame!).
Finally, the last film that deals with snuff is even a Hollywood mega-production with Nicolas Cage in the lead role; "8 mm" by Joel Schumacher in 1999, which is a sort of remake of "Hardcore," the plot is in fact practically the same for a film far removed from the visual cruelty of the 1970s trend, but which nevertheless appears well-conceived, well-acted, and well-directed.
We must take stock of the fact that today we can forget that films like "Cannibal Holocaust" or "Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali" are made, at least as far as Europe and the United States are concerned, the well-meaning public opinion would crush them with the result of not seeing them projected either in cinemas or on television, where only fiction of good feelings prevail. Let's try to rediscover these old cult films and be content.
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