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T A B L E+T A L K

"People snarling, wild opinions flung around, lines drawn in the sand": Garrison Keillor and Salon readers have it out in Table Talk over "Sister Carrie"

F E A T U R E

"Sister Carrie"
By Garrison Keillor
Why did they ever ban a book this bad?
(10/13/97)

R E C E N T L Y

Bleeding London
By Geoff Nicholson
Fiction
(10/15/97)

The Subtle Knife
By Philip Pullman
Fiction
(10/14/97)

The Last Time I Wore a Dress
By Daphne Scholinski (with Jane Meredith Adams)
Nonfiction
(10/13/97)

Stone Cowboy
By Mark Jacobs
Fiction
(10/10/97)

My Brother: A Memoir
By Jamaica Kincaid
Nonfiction
(10/09/97)

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gods of death
one man hunts the truth about snuff films

306 PAGES

BY MICHAEL BOXALL | evil incarnate is not a fashionable concept, but it's about the only way to get a handle on the snuff film business. What else would make somebody rape a woman or a child -- who had been kidnapped or bought -- and then kill her or him on camera? This is not behavior that can be treated with a 12-step recovery program. "The feeling is so good, it makes everything else seem so trivial, so stupid," a filmmaker identified only as Raymond A. told Yaron Svoray. "Can you understand this moment of sheer joy? I am God. I decide if she lives or dies."

Once reserved for emperors and victorious soldiery, the spectacle of sexual killing can now be enjoyed by anybody with a burned-out conscience and the right connections. Or so Svoray claims. Although he describes seeing snuff films in a gated complex somewhere north of New York and at a kind of porn trade show in a French château, he never actually acquired one for himself. Nevertheless, he insists they are available. The price tag, he reports, is $250,000, and the enterprising owner can take it on the road, setting up screenings at which aficionados pay $1,500 each. This makes jerking off while somebody gets their throat slashed an up-market pastime, though not prohibitively expensive for the neatly dressed professionals who appear to form the audiences.

Svoray, an Israeli journalist, claims to have seen his first snuff film while reporting on the neo-Nazi underground in Germany. In it, a girl of 8 or 10 was raped and tortured by five men, then lifted up by her hair and stabbed in the chest, a process known with Teutonic jocularity as schlitze und dize -- slice and dice. His subsequent investigation, described in "Gods of Death," brought him into contact with dealers and pimps and gangsters on three continents, a cross-section of the walking dead richly deserving of hell's worst torments.

What starts off as an account of a moral crusade to uncover the key players in the snuff film industry, though, quickly turns into a rather slick thriller. Svoray's collaborator in writing "Gods of Death" was a screenwriter, and the sequence of events seems to have been massaged considerably so things have a beginning, a middle and an end. There's even an element of farce, when a real wedding party arrives at a restaurant set up for an elegant sting operation. Brash, tough and resourceful, Svoray sticks -- perhaps wisely -- to a dramatic and readable account of how he pursued his quarry and does not speculate about why people watch snuff movies.

But in doing so he leaves the most important questions unasked. Who are these viewers whose dollars supposedly keep the Russian mafia and Croatian mercenaries slitting throats? How did they acquire this taste? Were they born with a desire for extreme forms of non-consensual sex, a dark and savage appetite that sets them apart from other people? Or did they pick it up over time? Anti-censorship advocates have a vested interest in the argument that snuff films are just a rather gruesome modern myth -- just as Svoray, one eye on a movie deal, is committed to proving they exist. Too bad that "Gods of Death," with its changed names and rejigged chronology, leaves these issues unresolved, and that it bases its claims on such shaky facts.
SALON | Oct. 16, 1997

Michael Boxall is a writer who lives in Vancouver.