Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

Like many other cinema-goers, Miss Poubelle found The Blair Witch Project to be a well-done and entertaining movie. One of the things that made the film interesting was the skillful grafting of the conventions of a documentary onto a work of fiction. The publicity for the film strongly suggested that the story was true, and that the actors were truly student filmmakers out to explore local legends. Of course, there was no Blair witch, the actors in the film were just actors, and the movie was professionally shot, and not just compiled from films found by the missing students.

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Many of the movie-going public, however, were entirely convinced by the pseudo-documentary, and believed that it was true. The town in which The Blair Witch Project was set, Burkittsville, Maryland, reported a large upswing in tourism subsequent to the release of the movie. Visitors were convinced that fiction was actually fact.

While the case of The Blair Witch Project was relatively harmless, in that no real damage came from the public's confusion, other cases have not been quite so innocuous. The movie Snuff, which first appeared in 1975, is a case in point. It began life as a low-budget horror movie, but managed to convince a generation that there is an industry devoted to producing murderous pornography.

The film was first released in 1971 under the title Slaughter, and did not fare well at the box office. It was purchased by Allan Shackleton, who decided to take advantage of the sexual revolution by retitling the movie Snuff, and presenting it to audiences as an example of a heretofore unknown genre of pornography featuring a real live murder. According to the rumors generated by the publicity for the film, rich degenerates lured women into South American snuff movies, in which they would be raped and murdered in front of a camera. Shackleton went so far as to hire people to protest the film, hoping to attract more publicity. Of course, the film was fiction, and its murder scene was faked, but a substantial population was fooled. (The web site for the Skeptical Inquirer, www.csicop.org/si/, gives more details on this film.)

Shackleton's efforts were rewarded with large profits for Snuff, while in the process he gave birth to an urban legend that persists to this day. The idea that there is some commercial industry devoted to producing snuff movies has never made much sense. Wouldn't the actors in such a movie risk prosecution for murder? How would the films be distributed? How would they find an audience? Police departments that have investigated the rumors of such films have never uncovered a single instance of a snuff movie.

Miss Poubelle does not deny the possibility that someone, somewhere has filmed a murder for erotic purposes. It is hard to imagine what some twisted person might not try. But there has never been any systematic commercial production of snuff films, according to pretty much all the authorities. In the same way, Miss Poubelle does not deny the possibility that someone has actually once stuck a gerbil up his or her ass. But it has never been a regular practice of any group of people, much less gay men.

Both gerbilling and snuff movies fall into the category of urban legend, and the widespread credence both have gained has been damaging to the cause of sexual liberation. The snuff film myth arose in reaction to the initial gains for first amendment rights for sexually explicit films and literature. Groups such as Women Against Pornography latched onto it as one more argument in favor of abolishing all pornography, and as recently as the mid 80s snuff movie scares have been used by tabloids in Britain to bolster support for video censorship.

The gerbil myth arose at about the same time as the first cases of AIDS in gay men, and it helped legitimate the idea that gay men somehow deserved to get the disease as a result of their perverted behavior. We may enjoy the blendings of fact and fiction that are becoming more common in our arts and literature these days. Tall tales are relatively harmless when told to gullible tourists too-eager for adventure, but it is another matter when public prejudices towards sexual expression are being shaped by fiction, rather than facts.