[Snuff. Historical film comments on a current topic].

The movie genre "snuff" appeared in the late 70s and shows the allegedly real, often cruel killing of people. More recently, a growing number of short video clips have been distributed via the internet, which also belong into this category and were clearly recognized as fictional on the basis of technical details by two study groups at the 80th Annual Meeting of the German Society of Legal Medicine held in Interlaken from 25 to 29 September 2001 (Schyma/Seidl). By means of a brief review of film history the article shows that "snuff movies" originated from a certain prevailing trend, examples of which are the murder of the actress Sharon Tate by the group around Charles Manson, the development of B horror movies, a promotional campaign for a film which flopped in 1971 (renamed several times by the distribution company from "American Cannibal" to "Snuff" to "Big Snuff") and elements of urban legends. Retrospectively there are no clues that Snuff films--i.e. movies openly distributed and actually available to the public, which were not private documentations found by the police at the homes of killers during investigations of homicides (such as in the murder series of the couple Bernardo/Homolka)--show real killings.