Editing Snuff film (section)

===Origins of the urban legend===
The noun ''snuff'' originally meant the part of a candle wick that has already burned; the verb ''snuff'' meant to cut this off, and by extension to extinguish or kill.<ref>''[[Oxford English Dictionary]]'', 1st ed, 1913</ref> The word has been used in this sense in English slang for hundreds of years. It was defined in 1874 as a "term very common among the lower orders of London, meaning to die from disease or accident".<ref>[[John Camden Hotten]], ''[[A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words]]'', 5th edition</ref>

Film studies professor Boaz Hagin argues that the concept of films showing actual murders originated decades earlier than is commonly believed, at least as early as 1907. That year, Polish-French writer [[Guillaume Apollinaire]] published the short story ''A Good Film'' about [[newsreel]] photojournalists who stage and film a murder due to public fascination with crime news; in the story, the public believes the murder is real but police determine that the crime was faked.<ref>Boaz Hagin. Killed Because of Lousy Ratings: The Hollywood History of the Snuff Film. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 2010 DOI: 10.1080/01956050903578414</ref> Hagin also proposes that the film ''[[Network (1976 film)|Network]]'' (1976) contains an explicit (fictional) snuff film depiction when television news executives orchestrate the on-air murder of a news anchor to boost ratings.

According to film critic [[Geoffrey O'Brien]], "whether or not commercially distributed 'snuff' movies actually exist, the possibility of such movies is implicit in the stock [[B-movie]] motif of the mad artist killing his models, as in ''[[A Bucket of Blood]]'' (1959), ''[[Color Me Blood Red]]'' (1965), or ''Decoy for Terror'' (1967) also known as ''Playgirl Killer''."<ref>{{cite news|author=O’Brien, Geoffrey|author-link=Geoffrey O’Brien|date=1993|title=Horror for Pleasure|work=[[The New York Review of Books]]}} (April 22 issue), n.1.</ref> Likewise, the protagonist of ''[[Peeping Tom (1960 film)|Peeping Tom]]'' (1960) films the murders he commits, though he does so as part of his mania and not for financial gain: a 1979 article in ''[[The New York Times]]'' described the character's activity as making "private 'snuff' films".<ref>{{Cite news|author=[[Vincent Canby]]|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/14/archives/film-michael-powells-peeping-tomthe-cast.html|title=Film: Michael Powell's 'Peeping Tom':The Cast |date=1979-10-14|access-date=2022-10-12 |work=The New York Times}}</ref>

The first known use of the term ''snuff movie'' is in a 1971 book by [[Ed Sanders]], ''The Family: The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion''. This book included the interview of an anonymous one-time member of [[Charles Manson]]'s "[[Manson Family|Family]]", who claimed that the group once made such a film in [[California]], by recording the murder of a woman. However, the interviewee later added that he had not watched the film himself and had just heard rumors of its existence. In later editions of the book, Sanders clarified that no films depicting real murders or murder victims had been found.<ref name=snopesApril2021/><ref>{{cite book| url = https://archive.org/details/familystoryofcha00sande| title = extract from book| year = 1971| publisher = New York, Dutton| isbn = 9780525103004}}</ref>

During the first half of the 1970s, [[urban legend]]s started to allege that snuff films were being produced in [[South America]] for commercial gain, and circulated clandestinely in the United States.<ref name="csicop.org"/><ref name="Cashing">"Cashing in on rumors that a 'snuff' film had been smuggled into the United States from South America, Schackleton retitled his movie Snuff and released it in late 1975, advertising its faked evisceration as the real thing", David A. Cook, ''Lost Illusions: American Cinema in The Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam'', page 233 (University of California Press, Ltd., 2000). {{ISBN|0-520-23265-8}}</ref>