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Claim: Films are routinely made for distribution in which participants are murdered on camera.

Status: False.

Origins: All the fretting about it aside, not so much as one snuff film has been found. Time and again, what is originally decried in the press as a film of a murder turns out, upon further investigation, to be a fake. Police on three continents routinely investigate films brought to them, and so far this has always been their verdict. No snuff films. Some clever fakes, yes. But no real product.
-- Snopes.Com

Cecil Adams -of StraightDope.Com- Says this about snuff films:"Every few years since then snuff movies have been back in the news, either because some nut is accused of trying to make one (never successfully) or the tabloids report some sensational claim, e.g., that the main centers for the snuff movie industry are London, Amsterdam, and Bangkok. But pornography experts for the FBI and other law enforcement agencies say they have never seen a genuine snuff film."

The Snopes piece was written in 1999. The Straight Dope answer in 1993. The Iraq war, Nicholas Berg and the Internet changed all that.

Before the web, so many types of imagery were hard to obtain if you were the average Joe. You had to subscribe to publications like Fangoria to see the stuff. Or you'd have to order photos and video from dubious locations, listed in the backs of seedy magazines. When Faces of Death 2 came out on VHS in the early eighties, thousands of pre-teen boys tested their manhood by watching clip after clip of staged and newsreel death footage.

The audience was there but it was the World Wide Web that brought instant gratification to the morbidly curious. Sites like Consumption Junction and Ogrish thrive today because they serve images and video of unending gore. When the pictures of the tortured Abu Ghraib prisoners came out, it was the Internet where people got to see all the images, not just the few pics the mainstream press deemed "viewable". Even then, the real-live snuff film was still a myth.

Then on May 11, 2004, the website of a group named Muntada al-Ansar released a video of an American they had captured as a hostage. His name was Nicholas Berg. On the video, Berg sits in front of his captors, identifies himself and names the members of his family. After that, one of his captors makes a speech about the abuses against prisoners in Abu Ghraib and how Berg is to killed in retaliation. Then the men surround Berg and saw his head off with a crude knife.

A little over two years before, journalist Daniel Pearl was captured and killed by a group called the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty. They too released a killing video but the frames were messed up, leaving out the instance of an actual murder. The Pearl video made the rounds on the net but it can't technically be considered a true snuff film. Not like the Nick Berg video.

There are a lot of people that say the Berg video is a fake. Maybe they're all as fake as the bogus beheading vid created by Benjamin Vanderford. The difference being that Ben Vanderford is still alive while Nick Berg, Paul Johnson, Kim Sun-Il, Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong are really dead.

Since the death of Nicholas Berg, there have been more beheadings and more resulting snuff vids, posted on websites, in message boards and traded on peer-to-peer networks. As I write this, there are reports that hostage Kenneth Bigley has been murdered and if true, his death is probably recorded on tape. Bigley will become like the others. All the dead are now victims of some kind of sick, posthumus fame. Unwitting stars of a new 21st century entertainment genre, the Snuff of War. The Iraq war. The war where the reasons for going were fake.

I end with this from the writer of the Snopes piece on snuff films, Barbara Mikkelson:

"However, we do fear the notion of a "murder as a business" set-up because that takes the slavering maniac right out of the picture and in his place substitutes the Reasonable Man Out To Make a Buck. Victims of such a scheme could be undeserving (innocent) -- this could happen to us! And it is on the back of this fear belief in the myth rides in on.

We fear not the killers among us, but the businessmen."