The recent direct-to-DVD horror
Terror Trap tells of a couple who discover the isolated motel they are stranded at is used as a studio to produce snuff movies - films that purportedly depict actual homicide. The staff at the motel are all involved, and the residents of the small rural town the motel stands outside, are also aware of the films being produced there and, chillingly, turn a blind eye. While writing a review of
Terror Trap, I began to think about other films that revolve around the idea of snuff movies...
Mute Witness (1994). A deliriously taut exercise in sustained tension and suspense, Mute Witness stars Marina Zudina as Billy, a special effects make-up artist working on a low budget slasher movie in deepest, darkest Moscow. Staying late at the creepy, crumbling studio one night, Billy witnesses the filming of a snuff movie and is relentlessly pursued around the sprawling studio buildings by the filmmakers. Billy is mute, and therefore can't simply call for help or alert anyone to her whereabouts. When the police are convinced Billy only witnessed an elaborate special effects sequence being shot, the killers close in, sparking a deliciously thrilling and prolonged game of cat and mouse that builds to a shocking climax.
My Little Eye (2002). A barbed critique of contemporary society’s obsession with ‘reality TV’, and a tightly wound, slow-burning chiller,
My Little Eye is an effective shocker that explores themes of voyeurism, paranoia and the risks of vainglory. A group of strangers audition for a
Big Brother style web-series in which they stay at a remote house in the middle of snowbound-nowhere. Their every move is recorded by myriad CCTV cameras throughout the house. Events take a turn for the sinister when the group realise the site they’re being broadcast on is a snuff site… Bloody murders, paranoia and bleak denouements ensue.
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| Vacancy |
Vacancy (2007). The premise of
Terror Trap sounds a lot like that of Nimród Antal’s gritty survival horror,
Vacancy. A young married couple are stranded at an isolated motel and after the discovery of hidden video cameras in their room, they realize – to their horror - that unless they escape, they are set to become the reluctant stars of a snuff film. Also like
Terror Trap, this begins with slow-burning tension as Antal piles on the dank suspense and panicky feeling of helplessness before letting loose with the shocks. The briefly glimpsed snuff movies in this one are bleak, despairing and surprisingly disturbing for such a mainstream Hollywood horror.
Tesis (1996). The debut feature of Alejandro Amenábar, director of
Open Your Eyes and
The Others,
Tesis (
Thesis) tells of Ángela (Ana Torrent), a film student who inadvertently watches a real snuff movie while researching her thesis on violence in cinema. She is soon drawn into a disturbing world of violence, snuff film production and shadowy institutional cover-ups. Taking an intelligent and highly reflexive approach to its subject matter – the effects of cinematic violence on audiences –
Tesis is also a tension-fuelled thriller. It inspired the Nicolas Cage-starring, Andrew Kevin Walker-scripted
8MM.
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| Peeping Tom |
Peeping Tom (1960). Critically panned on its release, this film derailed the career of its director, Michael Powell. It was only years later that
Peeping Tom was given a critical reappraisal and justly lauded. Unfolding as a Hitchcockian thriller in which a disturbed young man murders various women and films their terrified reactions,
Peeping Tom also serves as a disarming investigation of the voyeuristic nature of film audiences and their fascination with fear. Placing the audience firmly in the place of the killer (he uses a spiked tripod leg on the end of a film camera to kill his victims while he films them),
Peeping Tom had an overwhelming influence on the slasher film; in which the viewer is implicated in the onscreen murders through incriminating point of view camera work.
