A snuff film or snuff movie is a motion picture genre that depicts the actual death or murder of a person or people, without the aid of special effects, for the express purpose of distribution and entertainment or financial exploitation. Though deaths have been captured on film, snuff films as commonly defined are generally regarded as an urban legend.
The first recorded use of the term "snuff film" is in a 1971 book by Ed Sanders, The Family: Th...
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A snuff film or snuff movie is a motion picture genre that depicts the actual death or murder of a person or people, without the aid of special effects, for the express purpose of distribution and entertainment or financial exploitation. Though deaths have been captured on film, snuff films as commonly defined are generally regarded as an urban legend.
The first recorded use of the term "snuff film" is in a 1971 book by Ed Sanders, The Family: The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion, in which it is alleged that The Manson Family might have been involved in the making of such a film.
The metaphorical use of the term snuff to denote killing appears to be derived from a verb for the extinguishing of a candle flame; for example, in Edgar Rice Burroughs's fifth Tarzan book Tarzan and The Jewels of Opar (1916). "Snuffed it", meaning dead, was used repeatedly in the novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), for example. But this word has been used in English slang for hundreds of...
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