Klaus Kinski had the look of man of a man possessed—a cross between Iggy Pop and a comic book psychopath. It was a look that could convince the unwary he had just escaped from Arkham asylum and was now out for bloody revenge. It was a look earned by painful experience which hid the deeply troubled and sensitive artist underneath.

In truth, Kinski’s mental health was an issue. In the 1950s, he spent three days in a psychiatric hospital where the preliminary diagnosis was schizophrenia—the “conclusion psychopathy.”

He attempted suicide first with an overdose of morphine tablets and then a few days later with an overdose of sleeping pills. One doctor wrote that Kinski was “a danger to the public”:

His speech is violent. In this, his self-centred and incorrigible personality is evident as one that can’t blend in civil circumstances. He remains consistent to his egocentric world view and declares all others prejudiced [...] The patient hasn’t had a job in one year, but still speaks confidently of the new film in which he will star.

Another doctor concluded the young actor showed “signs of severe mental illness.” After a series of insulin treatments, Kinski was released. He believed he was being persecuted which made him all the more determined to make a success of his life.

A few years later, Kinski established himself as an up-and-coming actor in Vienna. But his volatile personality—the anger, the passion that fueled his performances—caused him to be labeled as too difficult. To compensate, and keep a roof over his head, he performed one-man shows reciting Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Francois Villon.

He found some financial security as a bit player in movies—most notably the spaghetti western For a Few Dollars More and war films such as A Time to Love and a Time to Die and The Counterfeit Traitor. But Kinski had a talent and an ego that inspired him to hold bolder, greater, more personal ambitions.
 

 
In 1971, Kinski hired the Deutschlandhalle to perform his own 30-page interpretation of the life of Jesus Christ—Jesus Christus Erlöser (“Jesus Christ Saviour”). It was no ordinary show. It attracted an audience of diametrically opposed fans—radical students, religious followers and those intrigued to just see the “madman Kinski” did next.

A production about Jesus Christ by one of Germany’s most notorious actors was bound to cause confusion and controversy. Some of the audience seemed to think Kinski was evangelizing, rather than interpreting a role. This led to constant heckling from the spectators. The Christians thought he was blaspheming. Those on the Left thought he was a snake oil salesman for Christianity. Kinski was doing none of this. His Christ was part Kinski, part revolutionary, and part troubled soul. As the audience heckled, Kinski responded to the abuse, as Twitch Film notes:

[A]fter someone stated that shouting down people who disagreed with him was unlike Christ, Kinski responded with a different take on how Christ might respond: “No, he didn’t say ‘shut your mouths’, he took a whip and beat them. That’s what he did, you stupid sow!”

He challenged the audience: “can’t you see that when someone lectures thirty typewritten pages of text in this way, that you must shut your mouths? If you can’t see that, please let someone bang it into your brain with a hammer!” The evening’s festivities also turned physical as an audience member is shown getting bounced from the stage by a bodyguard. Someone responds that “Kinski just let his bodyguard push a peaceful guy, who only wanted to have a discussion, down the stairs! That is a fascist statement, Kinski is a fascist, a psychopath!”

 

 
Kinski was unbowed:

I’m not the official Church-Christ, who is accepted by policemen, bankers, judges, executioners, officers, church-heads, politicians and other representatives of the powers that be. - I’m not your super-star!

In a filmed interview, Kinski was asked whether in light of the popularity of such shows as Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell if he was merely riding a fashionable wave to win popularity. Kinski replied he’d had the idea of making a play out of Christ’s life for some time.

I originally had this idea twenty years ago. When I was six years old I received my only praise…usually I got punished in school…I got praised because I learnt the New Testament by heart, I didn’t really understand it but I was just good at learning texts by heart. But accusing me of riding a popular wave is just plain stupid—it was already in the papers twelve years ago that I’m going to interpret the New Testament and already twelve years ago people were annoyed with me because of that. And what do you mean by “riding the popular wave”? I’m a good rider, but on a horse.

Kinski thought the church distorted the New Testament “with murderous intent—because the church, as everyone knows, did interpret it to fit their intentions.”
 
More Klaus Kinski after the jump…

 
An unidentified Bible-thumping halfwit and her—get this—twelve children shot cell phone footage of their cringey two-minute dumdum hate parade through a Target store and it’s starting to go viral. The family probably posted it to Facebook themselves (clearly one of her minions held the phone that shot it) but it made its way to YouTube. I could find next to no information about this. There’s not even any information about the location of the Target store or anything else. What you see is what you get.

And what you get is a breathtaking display of idiocy, bigotry and I’m guessing more than a ladleful of severe mental illness. Obviously she is a “Christian” and how much do you wanna bet that she is also a Republican voter? (The GOP wants to curtail voting access for blacks, but this pathological freak is okay with a ballot? And no doubt a gun to protect her family against homos and that Obama, too? Right...)

So what’s going on here is that this… perturbed and disturbed woman is apparently angry that Target allows transgender customers to use bathrooms and changing rooms that correspond to their gender identity, so she brought along her… brood (How much do you wanna bet that they are homeschooled, huh?) and traipsed through a Target whilst hoisting a Bible and annoying everyone in the store who is not one of her blood relatives who she also happened to give birth to.

Maybe the Westboro Baptist Church has some competition? Meet the hateful new Christian kids on the block!

“Attention Target customers… Do not be deceived, Target would have you believe with their Mother’s Day displays that they love mothers and children. This is a deception. This is not love, and they’ve proven it by opening their bathrooms to perverted men. I’m a mother of 12 and I’m very disgusted by this wicked practice.”

Hey look, I’m disgusted by this fucking walking, shouting imbecile factory who feels entitled to bring twelve more genetically deficient morons into the world, yet I’m not inclined to wear such a statement on a sandwich board and walk around like a weirdo outside of this lady’s church. When you’re a Christian in America, though, you don’t need an excuse to wear your hatred (and IQ) so proudly. It’s your birthright!

“Mothers get your children out of this store. Mothers have enough decency to get out of this store, it’s a dangerous place… What Target has done is very hateful. It’s hateful towards families. It’s hateful towards mothers. It’s hateful towards children… Are you gonna let the devil rape your children?”

I thought that was the job of the clergy?

All in all though, as this video makes the rounds today, you have to give this head-shakingly ridiculous woman credit for all of the minds she changed with her goofy self-righteous God-bothering tirade. Not the way she intended to change them, but still. Bless.
 

 
Via Raw Story

 
Honestly, I have no freakin’ clue what’s going on here or why this woman felt compelled to bitch-out a welcoming Easter Bunny. But she did. And it deserves to be here on Dangerous Minds.

It’s not her first appearance here, though, it’s her third. She’s Christine Weick, the same Christian wingnut activist (prophet?) who was promoting that obviously true Monster Energy drink satanic conspiracy theory back in 2014. She also went nutso at a Muslim prayer event held in the National Cathedral not long after that and you may recall when she got a Slushie thrown in her face in front of a news crew on Mother’s Day as she held a sign reading, “Thank your mom today for not being gay!”

Weick, who admits to living out of her car, has authored the book Explain This! A Verse by Verse Explanation of the Book of Revelation.

God “speaks” to Christine Weick, if you know what I mean…and I think you do.

I like the part towards the end when her lil’ sidekick and partner-in-crime yells, “Hugh Hefner!” The whole thing is just… too surreal.

 
Of all the 9/11 conspiracy theories floating around out there, this one’s my… favorite.

According to the fellow in the video below, which was influenced by a post on a David Icke conspiracy forum, the Masons were behind the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. They left clues about their (long) planned event on the 1979 Supertramp album Breakfast In America.

According to the video, Supertramp financier Stanley August Miesegaes was a Mason who used the cover art of the best-selling Breakfast in America album to reveal details about a planned “event” against the World Trade Center.
 

Supertramp financier, Stanley August Miesegaes—according to the video, that *could be* a masonic pendant around his neck. A correction at the beginning of the video indicates that the theorist isn’t certain if Miesegaes was indeed a 33rd degree Mason or not. Just to, you know, clear that up for y’uns!
 
The video offers evidence that the iconic album cover is a bit of “predictive programming,” a notion popular among conspiracy buffs that our overlords embed messages into pop culture in order to psychologically prepare the general population for certain events. Apparently Breakfast in America was to be the subliminal mental lubrication citizens would need two decades later to accept the tragedy of 9/11. This evidence includes the cover’s depiction of the New York City skyline as seen from an airplane window. CHECK. A waitress posing as the Statue of Liberty holds a glass of orange juice over the center of the World Trade Center, indicating the color of the fireball that would tear through the buildings.  CHECK. Just above the World Trade Center, if you hold the record up to a mirror, you see that the “u” and “p” from “Supertramp” resembles the numbers “911.”  CHECK.
 

 
The fateful event was to take place in the morning of September 11—breakfast time in America.

DOUBLE CHECK!

Furthermore, the words “super” and “tramp” are synonyms for “great” and “whore,” which indicates the Great Whore of Babylon, a figure from Christian mythology, with Babylon also mentioned as a place of evil in the Book of Revelation. And if that’s not proof enough for you, why the back cover has yet another illustration of a plane flying above the twin towers.

All in all, it’s a pretty compelling case that “somebody pre-knew about it,” right?
 

 
Back in 1992, someone over at the Japanese video game giant Konami decided that the world had waited long enough for a video game version of one of the cheesiest movies ever made, Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space.
 

Vampira (played by Finnish-born actress, Maila Nurmi), in a digitized scene from the ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space’ video game
 

Tor Johnson as seen in the 1992 video game
 
The point-and-click style game was released for Commodore’s Amiga personal computer and the Atari ST in both Europe and the US. Hard-to-find copies of the original game also came with a bonus—a VHS tape of Wood’s film inside. Like the film itself, gameplay was pretty tedious. As the player, you are a private investigator who must travel to locations in and around Los Angeles in search of missing film reels that were stolen by Bela Lugosi’s movie double. To spice things up a little, Konami used digitized footage (pictured above) from Plan 9 From Outer Space in their game design, which was actually pretty slick for the time (believe it or not, kids).
 

Screenshots from the “Plan 9 from Outer Space” video game by Konami, 1992
 
Continues after the jump…

 
At the age of ten, Howard Menger was playing in the woods near his home in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, when he claims that he encountered a beautiful blonde from Venus wearing a “ski-type outfit.” It was the first in a series of alleged contacts with extraterrestrials that culminated in the alleged landing of an interplanetary spacecraft at Menger’s house in High Bridge, New Jersey in 1956, and included a musical transmission from Saturn that Menger was allegedly instructed to deliver to the human race.

From the sleeve notes of Menger’s only LP, Authentic Music from Another Planet:

Howard Menger met a man from Saturn who played for him on a Saturnian instrument very much like our piano. He instructed Howard Menger that he was to bring this music to the attention of the people here on Earth by playing it for them on a piano. Howard Menger never played a piano before and had no knowledge of music whatsoever. Yet he was assured that, when he sat down at the piano, his hands would be guided and he would be able to play. From that time on, Howard Menger has been able to play the piano. He plays best after midnight. On several occasions he played for hours without rest, while his spellbound friends listened in appreciative silence and awe. This music as played by Howard Menger is never duplicated in his interpretation. When he is playing, it has an exhilarating effect on many people hearing this music.

 

 
Released by Newark’s Slate Enterprises, Inc., Authentic Music from Another Planet is a recording of Menger talking about his encounters with aliens and playing three pieces of music. The two selections on side one, “Marla” (for his wife, Connie, a/k/a Marla Baxter, the author of My Saturnian Lover) and “Theme from the Song from Saturn,” are merely “interpretations taken from the actual music that came from another Planet,” which is good, because they sound like all-too-human accordion music from Buca di Beppo. Side two is devoted to “The Song from Saturn,” the music the Space Brothers told Howard to bring back to Earth for our spiritual benefit. I think they gave their best tunes to Sun Ra, but I will say that it sounds like the music of the spheres compared to side one.

You can read Menger’s “incredible” story in his book From Outer Space To You, edited and published by Gray Barker, the notorious ufologist and hoaxer who probably came closest to revealing what he knew of our space masters’ secret agenda in his poem “UFO IS A BUCKET OF SHIT.”

All of Authentic Music from Another Planet is up at Internet Archive in the “Saucerology” section of Faded Discs Archive, Wendy Connors’ enormous hoard of UFO audio. Below, hear “The Song from Saturn.”
 

 
If you aren’t intensely following the developments of the Ammon Bundy-led heavily armed “peaceful protest” currently going on at the Oregon nature preserve, lemme tell ya, you are missing some Grade A comedy gold. Like how a fake “Ammon Bundy” on Twitter had hoaxed several mainstream media outlets. (The bearded cowboy derp with the big gun in Oregon is not on Twitter but apparently thought the parody account, this ersatz “Ammon Bundy” did a pretty good job of representing his “philosophy.” It’s a great detail, isn’t it?).

And now Donald Trump is weighing in, telling the New York Times editorial board:

“I think what I’d do, as president, is I would make a phone call to whoever, to the group. I’d talk to the leader. I would talk to him and I would say, ‘You gotta get out — come see me, but you gotta get out.”

It just keeps getting better and better. The latest news has a “representative” from the Trump campaign showing up with a camera crew to assist the militia group against “psychological warfare.”

I mean, what is this thing anyway? A sequel to Waiting for Guffman, with a Posse Comatose perhaps? Is it Blazing Saddles directed by Alex Jones?

Or perhaps it’s an Americanized take on Chris Morris’ darkly funny incompetent terrorist comedy Four Lions? I like that last notion the best, but as I am currently (like many of you reading this, I’m sure) binge watching Making a Murderer on Netflix, I can’t help but to hope that they are rolling video 24/7 at the protest.

Like imagine how this video, a “selfie” meant ostensibly for his wife and children, shot by self-promoting, self-aggrandizing “patriot” anti-Muslim hate crime-waiting-to-happen Jon Ritzheimer might be used in the context of a ten hour, true life Netflix mockumentary about this event. In the clip, Ritzheimer, then en route to the Oregon Mensa gathering at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, tearfully explains how “Daddy took an oath!”
 

 
Wow! He’s the fucking best, right? I can’t get enough of this goofy human time bomb.

But another colorful figure is starting to grab some of the spotlight…

Meet LaVoy Finicum...
 

 
LaVoy Finicum! This has to be the best name for a gun-toting rural rube since something WC Fields came up with, like Elmer Prettywillie or J. Pinkerton Snoopington… LaVoy fucking Finicum! Say it aloud for the maximum comic effect.

If you google his name, you’ll see that LaVoy Finicum is a fellow rancher and supporter of Cliven Bundy, Ammon’s daffy pappy and advisor to “the negro.” Finicum is also the author of the self-published quasi-apocalyptic anti-government novel Only By Blood and Suffering. Here’s his own blurb for the book, taken from Amazon:

Tells of a family’s struggle to come together and survive in the midst of national crisis. A stirring, fast-paced novel about what matters most in the face of devastating end-times chaos. Filled with gripping action and relatable characters, readers are drawn into the heart-rending dilemmas each member of the Bonham family faces. You may even find yourself stopping to ask, “What would I do?” LaVoy Finicum is a real life Northern Arizona Rancher who loves nothing more in life than God, freedom, and family. His spine tingling storytelling conveys in graphic detail just how fragile and precious freedom truly is and leaves his readers with an increased desire to stand for freedom

LaVoy Finicum also has a website to promote himself and his novel, OneCowboysStandForFreedom.com. Since joining up with Ammon Bundy in Oregon, Finicum was tweeted, several times, to get the word out on his book.

https://t.co/vmhDe4R8f1 Start the new year off with a good book

— LaVoy Finicum (@OneCowboysStand) January 2, 2016

I’m quite sure that, well, with a name like his that LaVoy Finicum is sincere about his goofy anti-government beliefs, but I also can’t help but wonder if he’s just trying to siphon off a lil’ of Ammon Bundy’s media spotlight to help himself to sell a few books?

Or maybe he’s just a complete nutjob?

Let’s let the man speak for himself. Here’s what he told an NBC reporter about how far he would go to defend his “freedom”:
 

 
LaVoy Finicum is also on Facebook, where his wall is currently filled with people calling him a fucking idiot and stuff like that.

More after the jump…

 
When Oliver Sacks was starting out on his career in neurology, he noted that many of his colleagues never seemed to read or make reference to any scientific papers more than five years old. Sacks found this strange, for as a teenager in England he had devoured numerous books on the history of chemistry and biology and even botany. However, to his fellow neurologists Sacks’ interest in the “historical and human dimension” of science was considered “archaic.” Undeterred, Sacks was convinced the historical narrative offered a better understanding of scientific investigation.

This became evident with his diagnosis of a patient who suffered incessant jerking movements of the head and limbs. With his knowledge of previous scientific investigations, Sacks was able to correctly identify the cause of the patient’s illness while at the same time confirm a theory put forward by two German pathologists—Hallervorden and Spatz—in 1922, which had almost been forgotten. This only further convinced Sacks of the great insights to be gleaned from having some historical understanding of science.

Something similar is going on here in the phantasmagorical Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs from 1552—which presents a continuous religious narrative from Biblical stories through historical events, and assumed portents and signs right up to the 16th century—the era when Protestantism became the dominant Christian religion in England, Scotland, Germany and Switzerland.

Privately commissioned in the German town of Augsburg, this “miracle” book was published in “123 folios with 23 inserts, each page fully illuminated, one astonishing, delicious, supersaturated picture follows another.” While church reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin denounced Catholicism for its superstitious and idolatrous beliefs, the Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs served to remind its Protestant readers of the hand of God working thru various strange and ominous events—earthquakes, plagues of locusts, weird beasts, monstrous births and unusual solar activity. Like many of his fellow reformers, Luther believed such portents signified The End of Days and the coming Apocalypse—a trope that continues to this day. 

But for the modern secular reader, these beautiful water colors and gouaches describe meteorological events—floods, hailstones, storms; seismic activity—the Lisbon earthquake; solar activity; and the cyclical path of comets; all of which—as Oliver Sacks understood—can give science its human and historical dimension.

M’colleague, Martin Schneider previously posted on this wondrous book, stating he wished he was able to read the descriptions accompanying the images. Well, this where possible I have now done or have described the scene illustrated. For those who would like to own their own copy, a facsimile edition of the Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs has been published by Taschen and is available here.
 

The great flood—in the center what maybe a representation of Noah’s ark.
 

The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
 

Moses parts the Red Sea.
 
More ‘divine’ revelation, after the jump….

 
When I watched this the first time, I wasn’t aware of the fact that it was actually produced by a group of conservatives, the Public Integrity Alliance of Arizona, a nonprofit largely made up of East Valley Republicans. Frankly one doesn’t expect to see something legitimately amusing coming from Republican quarters—as everyone knows Republicans aren’t funny. But this is excellent, a pitch-perfect country-rock video starring Phoenix-based comedian Brian Nissen’s redneck “Dwain” character, a mullet-wearing simpleton who wants to “make America great again” by voting for a blustering, buffoonish billionaire who believes American wages are too high, that we need a border wall to keep out all of the Muslims and Mexicans and all kinds of other silly stuff tailored to the basest of the GOP base… Perhaps you know who he’s talking about?

As Raw Story’s Travis Gettys points out, although the song brutally mocks Trump’s most outrageous ideas “in the bizarro world of the 2016 presidential race, it’s not hard to imagine Trump playing the song at his own rallies.” Sadly this is all too true…

“I’ve noticed that some of the Trump fans loved it,” said Tyler Montague, founder and president of PIA. “They’re like, ‘Yeah, this is everything Trump is about, this is dead on.’ We’re like, ‘You’re kidding us, right?’”

Montague, who appears in the video as a redneck buddy, said the 501(c)(4) group — which is not required to report its donors but cannot be used primarily to influence elections — became motivated to act after Trump suggested a ban on Muslims in the U.S.

“When he said the stuff about Muslims, we were like, we’ve got to call that out and make fun of the absurdity of that,” Montague said.

He blasted Trump’s ideas as anti-conservative and un-American.

“I don’t want to overstate it, but [Trump’s] kind of a fascist,” Montague said. “It’s the closest thing to fascism that America’s had, at least in our lifetime.”

Here’s the video. Tell me if you think the average Trump supporter will get the joke or simply sing along?
 

 
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.

Snuff started life as Slaughter, a dire exploitation film shot in 1971 by husband and wife filmmakers Michael and Roberta Findlay. The Findlays were prodigious in the field of exploitation. 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. One early production that Michael worked on (without Roberta) was Satan’s Bed (1965), starring the unknown Yoko Ono. 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). Slaughter was exceptionally bad, however. It fell between the cracks. 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.

Scrubbing all references to the Findlays’ movie, Shackleton removed the original title and credits and adopted a new title — Snuff, as in ‘snuff film’. 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. Now, Snuff was primed to electrify the imaginations of a new generation, same as the old generation.

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. For this task, Shackleton hired Simon Nuchtern, a jobbing director with a handful of not altogether remarkable movies to his name.
 

 
In the newly-edited Slaughter, the scene cuts away to reveal the new material: A studio set with actors caught in the moment. Surrounding the actors are the trappings of movie making, including one archetypal bulldozing director.

The director confides to a pretty production assistant that the last take “was dynamite. That was a gory scene and it really turned me on.” She confesses it turned her on, too.

What follows is a stupefying descent into madness, and for the tawdry movie of the last seventy-odd minutes a contrivance as daft as it is unexpected. The director, wearing a t-shirt that bears the slogan VIVA LA MUERTE (Long live death), begins to lean on the girl. “Why don’t you and I go to the bed and get turned on… turn each other on, mm?”

“What about all these people watching?” she asks.

“Give ’em just a minute, they’re gonna be gone.”

Still in long shot, still in whispers, the director and girl engage in a little light petting on the prop bed. Contrary to leaving, however, the other people in the room slowly focus their attention on the couple, including the cameraman and soundman.

Point of view of the cameraman as the couple grope and fondle; the girl’s startled face as she suddenly becomes aware that the camera is on them.

“What are you doing? Are you filming this? They’re filming it!”

The girl struggles to free herself from the director’s pawing. “Don’t worry about it,” he says.

“You’re crazy!”

“Just move a little back up here — ”

“You’re crazy!” Scared.

“ — right back up here.”

“Let me go!”

“Shaddap!” Then to the crew he says, “Do all of you wanna get a good scene?”

Cutaway to the crew and affirmation.

“Okay… watch yourself… watch …”

“Let me up!”

“… watch…”

“Let me go! You’re crazy!”

The director calls for assistance. A member of the crew expressionlessly complies, holding the girl’s arms down on the bed, while the director reaches for a knife.

“You’re crazy. You’re not serious. You’re not really gonna do it,” the girl pleads.

“You don’t think so?”

“N-no.”

“Think I’ll kill her…”

The director slices through the girl’s blouse and across her shoulder. Blood (the colour of raspberries) oozes from the wound. She writhes and hollers.

“Scream, go on, scream!” the director demands. “That’s it, scream!”

The screaming becomes a pathetic sob.

Exasperated, he bellows, “STOP!! You want to play!?”

Following a few minutes of spectacular, if hardly convincing violence, the frame runs to leader-tape, then blackness. A whisper punctuates the void: “Shit, shit… we ran out of film.”

Another voice whispers: “Did you get it — did you get it all?”

“Yeah, we got it all.”

“Let’s get outta here.”

The sound of breathing. Ends.
 

 
The movie did not premiere with any of its stars in attendance (after all, they were supposed to be dead), nor did it boast any local luminaries. Not many people attended the premiere at all. Sixteen people in total turned out for the first evening show at 6pm. A uniformed security guard was on hand to make sure no one below the age of eighteen was admitted.

Ticket price notwithstanding, Monarch stuck to their original campaign and public awareness of the movie increased. By the time Snuff left Indianapolis it was already picking up momentum. More than 300 people attended the film’s opening night at the Orpheum Theater in Wichita, Kansas, on January 30. Many of those in attendance were “laughing instead of moaning”, reported a theater spokesman. Shackleton was driving the print of the film in his car from one engagement to another on its route to New York, ballyhooing it at every turn. Having traveled from Cincinnati to St Paul, he witnessed people being turned away from the box office of the Strand Theater on the day of its St Paul premiere, February 20. Pickets and adverse press weren’t only conspiring to stop him in this instance: The theater itself had been closed down by police the day before the scheduled screening, pending a matter of theater licensing. The resourceful Shackleton simply packed Snuff back into his trunk and drove across the river to Minneapolis, where it played an impromptu engagement at the American Theater, fittingly an X-rated movie house, complete with ads proclaiming its ‘ban’ in St Paul.
 

The trailer—not really all that safe for work—for Shackleton’s ‘Snuff’
 
The Adult Film Association of America was not happy with Snuff. Not surprising really. Formed in 1969 to protect the interests of those involved in the production, distribution and exhibition of adult motion pictures, the AFAA fought against negative representation, which included among other things child exploitation and rumours of so-called snuff films. Shackleton, hitherto a member of the AFAA, was unceremoniously kicked out of the organization because of Snuff.

Aware that it was all a gimmick and that no one was actually killed in Snuff, the AFAA nevertheless took pains to distance itself from the film. It was the sort of attention they didn’t need. President Vince Miranda, owner of the Pussycat Theater chain, announced that AFAA member theaters would not be screening it. But by and large, Snuff circumvented adult theaters anyway and played the regular houses. The AFAA unwittingly played into Shackleton’s hands when its members joined picket lines on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. “We called a press conference to say the film was a phoney,” recalled AFAA chairman David Friedman, “and that we were proud to say we would not show it.” But the AFAA were not the only group protesting Snuff. Women’s groups were also up in arms.

The absurdity of a theatrical motion picture that dabbled in actual murder (of a crew member, no less) was lost on some; likewise, that such a movie, supposedly having been ‘smuggled’ into the country, should turn up in New York City and openly promote itself on Times Square and around the country. It didn’t matter because lobby groups still protested against it, media still arrived to document the protestations, and officials continued to look into the matter.

But the protests outside the National Theater, which included the presence of ‘high profile’ FBI agents, didn’t stop the movie grossing over $300,000 during its first eight weeks and it certainly didn’t halt the publicity, which shifted into gears possibly beyond the expectation of even Allan Shackleton. Snuff was a rampaging publicity monster.

Killing for Culture available now in special edition—out in paperback next year. And below you can check out the official new Killing For Culture documentary, The Death Illusion: Murder, Cinema & the Myth of Snuff, directed by David Hinds and written and narrated by occasional Dangerous Mind Thomas McGrath.