The Web Viles 01 - "Snuff Films Do Not Exist"

It is a commonly held belief today that the Internet has ushered in an era wherein the shockumentary has become a largely superfluous enterprise. The grisly scenes of carnage that one previously had to hunt down on obscure tapes to enjoy/endure, the argument goes, are now widely available on a plethora of Internet shock sites, and we can thusly safely toss the tapes in the trash.  However, while today's greater availability of mondo/shocku footage is certainly undeniable, some of us nonetheless remain of the opinion that the shockumentary continues to have a key role in today's day and age. The shockumentary brings together 60 to 90 minutes of grueling footage in a deathly monotonous onslaught unparalleled by the superficially fragmented presentation of web clips. Watching one or two short Internet clips you chance upon is incomparable to immersing yourself in a feature-length presentation of unbridled doom and demise for hours on end.

The sickly slew of shockumentary fodder being distributed on the danker, darker corners of the web, while perhaps best seen as complimentary sample morsels served alongside the main mondo dish, nonetheless cannot be wholly ignored either. With this in mind, we thus present a new sporadic series entitled The Web Viles, wherein each time we will take a close look at a web-based shocku clip.

For this, our first entry, let us look at one of the oldest online death clips around (the earliest mention of the clip that we could find was in January 2000, although the clip itself was made in 1999). The clip in question does not possess any sort of formal title although it is sometimes referred to as the "'snuff films do not exist' video" (due to the woman in the clip yelling out said phrase prior to being shot) or simply as the 'shot in the head snuff video', and has surfaced under any number of filenames such as snuff.mpg, kidnap.mpg, isitreal.mpg, and real_snuff_film.wmv, to name a few. The extremely short clip of approximately six seconds depicts a woman sitting on a chair (in fact, it is a wheelchair) and crying out the aforementioned phrase about snuff films, only to have a handgun discharged at her head by an unknown assailant.