Mock Snuff Film - Looking for information on a Dr Don and his prosecution and conviction.

[AnaV]

A while ago while perusing the depths of YouTube I came across this video.

Now obviously the videos a fake, but what interested me more was this “Dr Don” character, the creator of this and what looks like a slew of other videos involving staged murders of naked women. So far digging through his site has yielded me the impression that he was prosecuted and convicted of some sort of obscenity charges in Canada. Further digging has led to several dead ends, including a site I can not find any info on, the progressive art project website, a site including graphic staged pornographic murder. I’m stumped currently does anyone have any info or has heard anything about an independent filmmaker named Dr Don or this site?
Here’s his website (NSFW) https://web.archive.org/web/20060326174118/http://www.drdon.org/
Progressive Art Project (Extremely NSFW)
https://web.archive.org/web/20130901031638/http://www.the-progressive-art-project.com/guest.php?fa=
And a tear down of the video by a supposed Forensic expert
https://web.archive.org/web/20061231051610/http://www.alexanderjason.com/videoanalysis.htm

 

[Fromtheblackdepths]

Well we better rectify this mistake if they are truly fake.

But seriously though, this does sound interesting, I'll see what I can find.

 

[Ged!]

This seems interesting. Looks like an as of yet overlooked net art or horror project from the mid-2000s. I'll poke around a few archives and post anything interesting I find.

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

I remember this shit back in the Wild West Web days when I was a preteen when it was hard to tell apart what was and wasn't real & there was no frame of reference to anything. This is one thing I'm glad to confirm is fake.

 

[Alrakkan]

Archive of the OP video because YouTube.

Spoiler: SAID ARCHIVE

 

[A Logging Company]

Somewhat related: a famous Hollywood producer was arrested for CP possession years ago, and in an article talking about the bust, it says he also had snuff films. Snopes says snuff movies are fake, which I've always doubted, and I've wanted legal confirmation to throw in the face of people who take Snopes' word as gospel. But getting court docs is a process that isn't just a simple "download this PDF" unless someone has done the leg work.

Speaking of PDFs, here is a press release the DoJ put out at the time of his arrest and prosecution.

 

[Karl der Grosse]

Snuff films are real. Any discriminating snuff film buff knows that you can find hundreds of extremely graphic videos from Mexico of chainsaw massacres and machete mutilations online. Those are snuff films. The cartels love videotaping their killings, it's everywhere.

 

[George Orson Welles]

This is some glowie shit, dear lord.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Those are fetish snuff/necro videos so you should look around old Usenet groups, Yahoo groups, MSN groups and other places where boomers with strange, strange fetishes congregated.

 

[AnaV]

If anyone’s wondering how I did come across this, I was doing some research into “The Cuckoo Clock of Hell” cut of Last House on Dead End Street and this was recommended to me, thanks YouTube. To me the more interesting thing about this is this Dr Don character.

 

[Superman93]

Why the fuck is this in internet and technology?

 

[murdered meat bag]

Why the fuck is this in internet and technology?

I supposed because it requires browsing usenet and non-youtube sites.

 

[Syaoran Li]

Somewhat related: a famous Hollywood producer was arrested for CP possession years ago, and in an article talking about the bust, it says he also had snuff films. Snopes says snuff movies are fake, which I've always doubted, and I've wanted legal confirmation to throw in the face of people who take Snopes' word as gospel. But getting court docs is a process that isn't just a simple "download this PDF" unless someone has done the leg work.

Speaking of PDFs, here is a press release the DoJ put out at the time of his arrest and prosecution.

In Snopes's defense, I think the "snuff films don't exist" page dates back to the late 90's when the site was about urban legends and it was believed that the snuff film market was an urban legend and that most of the "snuff market" was comprised of fake videos or your "Faces of Death" style mondo movies of accidental deaths caught on film.

Back in the day, snuff films seemed like a damn near implausible thing to pull off when you only had tape trading. Same reason why CP was mostly comprised of photographs and maybe some vintage material from the 70's when it was technically legal prior to the advent of the internet.

I'm pretty sure the Gen X'ers in the era of Usenet were into mock snuff videos and "roughies" like Caligula, August Underground, and Forced Entry or gore-themed mondo movies like Traces of Death/Faces of Death or the Red Asphalt series.

If there were actual snuff films prior the advent of online video, it had to have been very low key tape trading that rarely went beyond a regional level. Charlie Sheen freaked out over one of the Guinea Pig VHS tapes and called the Feds and the MPAA over this shit and prior to that, fundies were harping about it since the 70's as part of a wider push against both porn and horror movies

The FBI were more or less forced to look into the snuff film phenomenon back in the early 90's during the waning days of the old Satanic Panic and it was debunked. Snopes was going off that information that's probably severely out of date.

Snuff films are real. Any discriminating snuff film buff knows that you can find hundreds of extremely graphic videos from Mexico of chainsaw massacres and machete mutilations online. Those are snuff films. The cartels love videotaping their killings, it's everywhere.

I'm not sure if those count as snuff films unless the cartels are actually selling the recordings of their crimes for entertainment and profit. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure that execution videos for the purpose of intimidation don't technically count.

To be a "true" snuff film, not only does the murder have to be planned for the movie but it also has to be meant for entertainment/titillation and sold for profit.

 

[le fishe]

hoodsite.com/bestgore are good enough wank material for me

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

In Snopes's defense, I think the "snuff films don't exist" page dates back to the late 90's when the site was about urban legends and it was believed that the snuff film market was an urban legend and that most of the "snuff market" was comprised of fake videos or your "Faces of Death" style mondo movies of accidental deaths caught on film.

To be a "true" snuff film, not only does the murder have to be planned for the movie but it also has to be meant for entertainment/titillation and sold for profit.

Way back during the advent of VHS there were a lot of of low budget zombie/cannibal films that were just trash, but many of them came with the promise that in this one they killed people for real, either because it was cheaper than special effects and they were filming in a third world country, or for 'realism'. Complete bullshit of course but IMO that was the general idea of what a snuff movie was, it was a movie made for profit and like you said it was made for titillation and/or entertainment. There's a movie that uses that as a plot, The Hills Run Red.

A really good one is Thesis/Tesis, it's the movie version of this thread. Well worth watching.

 

[Syaoran Li]

This post should probably go in Multimedia, but since the thread is here I'll post it here.

I've always wondered about the "fake snuff film" genre making a proper comeback and how to do so without it being either a "found footage" film that's a ripoff of August Underground or another rehash of A Serbian Film or Hostel. The way I'm thinking about it, you should go to the roots of the original urban legends and the era it came out of.

I'm thinking one could do a fake snuff film that's done in the style of a 1970's extreme "roughie" exploitation film complete with the stereotypical funky soundtrack and the grainy Super 8mm or 16mm film look. Part of why a lot of old 70's and early 80's horror movies had this disturbing look to them was the film quality, which we see a similar thing with VHS camcorder tapes as well.

The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre had this eerie vibe and aesthetic, as did a lot of the "gold standard" titles from extreme cinema like I Spit On Your Grave, Cannibal Holocaust, and The Last House on The Left.

Best way you could pull it off is if you did a meta "found footage" thing where the movie itself is a scripted work but there's a pre-release marketing campaign implying the movie was discovered in a bunch of old reels from the 70's. If you got the guys from Vinegar Syndrome to help out, it could work.

This ploy has kinda been done before with Cannibal Holocaust and Blair Witch Project but an old idea can still work with a new spin. Cannibal Holocaust was the first to blaze the trail while The Blair Witch Project used Web 1.0 to sell the myth.

I think you could do a similar thing even in the era of Web 2.0 if you did the horror equivalent of Deagle Nation using fake names with a fake but sorta believable persona. Put enough realistic looking fake documentation out there to make it look like the cast were obscure actors from the 1970's who more or less were forgotten.

 

[XYZpdq]

iirc the legends say Charlie Sheen was stupid and thought Guinea Pig Flower Of Flesh and Blood was real

 

[Syaoran Li]

iirc the legends say Charlie Sheen was stupid and thought Guinea Pig Flower Of Flesh and Blood was real

Given that the first two Guinea Pig movies were built on the premise of being fake snuff films in the style of a home video and the fact that a lot of the VHS copies that were circulating in America in the 80's and 90's were low-quality bootlegs probably helped sell the illusion and convince even Charlie Sheen.

It's one of the genres where the more low quality it looks, the more likely people think it's going to be the real deal.

 

[tehpope]

A lot of people thought "Last House on Dead End Street" was a real snuff film because it was mostly viewed through grey market bootlegs that were of nth generation quality (ie really shitty). Also all people who worked on the film used fake names on the credits. It wasn't until the film was re-issued on DVD and the director was revealed that the mystique went away.

I think the main idea of a snuff film is that someone could film a real fucking death, put it in a produced movie, and make money off it. And no one would be the wiser. Not just filming death. I mean, a lot of Mondo movies film death, but they're considered snuff. I think the closet society has ever gotten to this idea was Cannibal Holocaust. Since the director was almost charged with murder since he didn't want to bring his cast/crew out of hiding but eventually had to. People have filmed death all the time. Before something like the Zapruder film, it was pretty taboo and probably talked about in hushed tones.

Strangely, Japan had a huge facination with this subject. They produced a lot of films on the matter. Even ones made in English like "The Killing of America" and "Faces of Death" had Japanese funding. And then there's stuff like "The Shocks", which tries to combine the death comp film with interludes with humor and sexuality. The opening is pretty tasteless since it starts with the Challenger Explosion and they dub in explosion sound effects over the footage. This got shown in theaters in japan. Crazy.

Its a bit ironic that Snuff, the movie that popularized the snuff film in the public conscious, was faked. And the initial protesting for the film was faked as well.

The original release of "Killing For Culture" is a great book on this subject. There's a reissue done a few years ago but its not that good and strips all the "X of Death" films section away. The original is out there in digital form luckly.

 

[Syaoran Li]

A lot of people thought "Last House on Dead End Street" was a real snuff film because it was mostly viewed through grey market bootlegs that were of nth generation quality (ie really shitty). Also all people who worked on the film used fake names on the credits. It wasn't until the film was re-issued on DVD and the director was revealed that the mystique went away.

Its a bit ironic that Snuff, the movie that popularized the snuff film in the public conscious, was faked. And the initial protesting for the film was faked as well.

The original release of "Killing For Culture" is a great book on the subject. There's a reissue done a few years ago but its not that good and strips all the "X of Death" films section away.

I'll definitely check out that book.

As for a fake snuff film done in a fake 70's style, The Hills Run Red sorta ran with that concept but it was more of a slasher flick that used a snuff film as the core plot hook. What I would do is go full "Deagle Nation: Horror Edition" and get guys like Vinegar Syndrome or one of the more based guys from Red Letter Media or Blumhouse Pictures to help out.

Get completely unknown actors and credit them under obvious pseudonyms to help play up the feel of 70's grindhouse horror movies and porno films. Do a slow burn online media campaign that starts off small at first, maybe a few throwaway news articles and posts on Reddit, Twitter, and maybe 4chan as well about how some guys found a bunch of preserved reels from the 70's in some random obscure rural locale somewhere and then slowly build from there over the course of a year before the big release.

Try to get some old-school looking fan pages for the actors and a fake name for the company that supposedly produced the movie.

If you can get the permission from Color Climax Corporation, claim the original production company was a defunct subsidiary of that company since Color Climax were one of the first really big hardcore porn companies and were infamous for fetish material in the 70's and early 80's, including honest-to-god CP and bestiality (which were technically legal at the time but have since been banned and memory-holed by the current company) which naturally attracted a lot of rumors about snuff films made by that company under a subsidiary brand.

Part of why snuff films began to circulate as an urban legend in the 70's was because the decade as a while was a golden age for horror movies, exploitation films, and hardcore porn where it was "anything goes" in terms of creative concepts and even the porno flicks had plots and characters. Combine that with all the serial killers and violent crime running about and the Manson murders at the end of the previous decade and it was a perfect storm for that kind of thing

A hoax like this could be the kind of thing that really gets one's name in the history books of pop culture and horror cinema in the 2020's