[Slings and Arrows]

Is there really such a thing as a snuff film?

[weegee]

Porn films gone wrong. Ted McIlvenny, director of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality and caretaker of what is probably the world's largest collection of sex movies--289,000 films and 100,000 videos--says that in his 25 years of following the porn business he's seen exactly three films in which someone was killed on camera. In two cases the death was unintended: (1) a guy died of a heart attack while being beaten during an S&M scene; and (2) a man accidentally strangled himself during an autoerotic asphyxiation.

[weegee]

Anomalous weirdness. McIlvenny says the third film involving an actual death was a bizarre religious number from Morocco in which a hunchbacked kid was torn apart by wild horses while men stood around and masturbated. Sick, but not intended as commercial pornography.

[weegee]

Home videos by psychopaths. A commonly cited case involves Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, who in the mid-80s murdered at least 11 women in Lake's California cabin and made videos of several victims begging for mercy. I have not been able to confirm that anyone was actually killed on camera in this or similar cases, but wouldn't be surprised.