Surrounding the actors are the trappings of movie making, including one archetypal bulldozing director. In the newly-edited Slaughter, the scene cuts away to reveal the new material: A studio set with actors caught in the moment. For this task, Shackleton hired Simon Nuchtern, a jobbing director with a handful of not altogether remarkable movies to his name. The next move was to engineer additional footage (running a little under five-and-a-half minutes) and splice it onto what was left of Slaughter. Now, Snuff was primed to electrify the imaginations of a new generation, same as the old generation. Shackleton was ready to scratch a legend into the annals of exploitation history with a stunt comparable to the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, Orson Welles’ play that convinced 1938 America that Martians were invading Earth. Scrubbing all references to the Findlays’ movie, Shackleton removed the original title and credits and adopted a new title - Snuff, as in ‘snuff film’. Indeed, the film’s producer, exploitation specialist Allan Shackleton, had almost given up on it when he got the idea to film a new ending and precipitate its release as Snuff with a scurrilous marketing campaign. Slaughter was exceptionally bad, however. The rest is a succession of cheese and grindhouse sleaze, including roughies like Body of a Female (1964) and horror pictures like Shriek of the Mutilated (1974).

One early production that Michael worked on (without Roberta) was Satan’s Bed (1965), starring the unknown Yoko Ono. Whether working apart or together, they churned out films to meet current trends in the market, so cheap it was nigh impossible they could lose any money. The Findlays were prodigious in the field of exploitation. Snuff started life as Slaughter, a dire exploitation film shot in 1971 by husband and wife filmmakers Michael and Roberta Findlay. An exclusive excerpt from Killing For Culture: From Edison to Isis: A New History of Death on Film (by David Kerekes & David Slater), an all-new edition of the 90s cult classic, available now in special edition hardback.

Killing for Culture by David Kerekes