Snuff Boxing: Revisiting the "Snuff" (1976) Coda Media Studies

"Snuff" might not be the best‚ film produced in the Americas in the 1970s, but it may be the decade's most important worst‚ film. Rumoured to show the actual murder of a female crewmember in its final moments, its notoriety consolidated the urban legend of snuff film. The snuff film legacy has manifested across a broad range of media, from fictional snuff narratives like "Vacancy" (Nimród Antal, 2007) and "8mm" (Joel Schumacher, 1999), to fuelling rumours about the appearance of real‚ snuff footage online and distributed through mobile phones. The snuff film enigma was so intoxicatingly extra diegetic that it transcended the nuts-and-bolts details of the film itself, the shocking impact of those final five minutes appearing to render close analysisunnecessary. "Snuff", like snuff, was predicated upon a hyperactive theatricality of ambiguity, rumour and moral panic. This paper will reconsider the notorious "Snuff" coda, exploring alternate readings of this coda aside from the heated debates that marked the anti-pornography discourse that surrounded its original release.

Alexandra Nicholas is a Ph.D. candidate currently writing her thesis on microhistory and paracinematic horror in the Cinema Studies program. In 2007, she completed her MA thesis on rape-revenge film (for which she was awarded an university merit citation), and in 2006, she won an ARC Cultural Network Award for her work on Australian horror cinema. She publishes regularly in Metro magazine, and in 2009 has refereed journal articles appearing in Limina, Philament, Cinephile (the film journal of the University of British Columbia) and a book chapter on Ozploitation appearing in the collection, Trash Cinema.

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