In "Sinister," the new horror movie starring Ethan Hawke, a man explores the attic of his new home and finds a box of old Super 8 film reels. After his family goes to bed, he pours himself a whiskey and watches them: At first it's normal home-video sort of stuff, a family goofing around in their backyard on an autumn afternoon, and then it suddenly cuts to all of them, hooded, hanging from a tree.
It's a chilling image, and the latest example of commercial cinema trading on its most rumored and reviled cousin: the snuff movie. Slang for a film in which someone is actually and deliberately murdered on screen, snuff has long been considered an urban myth of sorts, always presumed to be out there, but with few people able to confirm a sighting. It's served as a plot premise for dozens of movies, from the intelligent ("Videodrome") to the inane ("8mm") and the depraved ("Kogyaru-gui: Osaka Terekura Hen [Eating Schoolgirls: Osaka Telephone Club]"), but a more interesting history lies in the films that purported to be snuff.
The classic faux-snuff film — and the movie that brought the term into widespread use — was the 1976 grindhouse nasty "Snuff." This was originally an Argentinian flick titled "Slaughter," which was kind of an inept "Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" take on the Manson family. The flick was bought up by Allan Shackleton of Monarch Pictures, who tacked a graphic on-set murder scene onto the end and ran a cheeky press campaign that traded in "is it real or not?" speculation. For those convinced of hippie depravity, it seemed believable enough, since the Manson family had reportedly filmed one of its bizarre murders.