S'nuff Said

The behind-the-scenes scoop on the movie that could only be made in Carter Stevens' studio, where life is CHEAP!

Interview by Mike Ward

Out of the Internet's many, many pornographic web sites, smnews.com is a bit unusual for a few reasons. First because, among its galleries of dirty pictures, contact information for others in the "BDSM scene," and ads for explicit videotapes, there is also a "writers' guidelines" section and a brief essay attempting to define "BDSM" by dropping the name of Krafft-Ebing and mentioning de Sade and von Sacher Masoch, not only by their Diagnostic Statistician's Manual classifications, but also by their names.

It is also unusual because the webmaster seems unrepentant about using his own Christian name in affiliation with the site. He is one Carter Stevens, and in addition to his web page he manages a print publication called S&M News , and throws seasonal "Fetish Fling" parties in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania. Stevens, not surprisingly, has a habit of attracting controversy, perhaps most recently when these parties drew the attention of the authorities, resort industries, and press in the area around them. What followed was a two-year struggle. On the one side were Stevens' patrons, defending what they felt to be their right to assemble. On the other, the locals -- concerned about community standards and fearful that what happened behind closed doors at these parties might fall afoul of the law.

Such debates are often visceral in a way that makes them tricky to resolve. However you choose to define it, BDSM is, after all, a set of practices in which erotic desire verges with physical violence -- and neither of these subjects is easily discussed. Carter and his compatriots could convey their indignation over being intruded upon, but scarcely their speechless pleasure when engaging in the sort of BDSM "play" that takes place at these parties. The townspeople of the Poconos, meanwhile, had no trouble putting into words their fears about the resort community's public image. But not so their inexplicable horror when they learned of sexual practices they didn't understand, or when they imagined, having few specifics, the worst conceivable things that could be happening in these hidden places.

Thorny as it was, the conflict in the Poconos is far from being Carter Stevens' most protracted controversy. In 1976 he helped to make and release a film called Snuff that stirred a much more visible uproar in the much more visible community of New York City. This is because the movie loosely claims to show the real-time, deliberate murder of a human being. Snuff was released on the heels of a hysteria brought about by rumors of a "snuff" movie being made somewhere in the American southwest, or possibly in South America. Some held the Manson "family" had shot such footage in the course of their 1969 rampage; others had vaguer stories to tell of cults who produced snuff movies as a part of Satanic rituals, or traffickers in child pornography whose film loops culminated in the killing and mutilation of their stars.

These were horrifying rumors, certainly, to those inclined to believe them. But in watching Snuff as an adult 25 years after the fact, it's hard to understand how exactly they got associated with this curious little film. It's a movie in which just about everything is muddy and unclear; if nothing else, though, it's immediately certain that the movie claimed no victims in real life. The movie is, in fact, the belated release of another film, called Slaughter , strictly fictional and woefully low-budget, made five years before in an aborted attempt to cash in on the popular fascination with the Manson murders.

Snuff re-presents this film in its entirety, but has about five minutes of additional footage spliced onto the end. The conceit of this additional footage is that after Slaughter 's final scene, the camera continues to run, buzzing around two members of the crew as they exchange a brief, porno-style dialog before beginning to make out on a bed. The man is then overtaken with an inexplicable, homicidal rage and slowly murders the woman -- occasionally calling out to the camera in the meantime, or groaning in sexual pleasure as he eviscerates her.

It would be a repugnant scene if it were not so poorly done; as it is, Snuff 's final scene is more a curiosity than the obscenity both its detractors and promoters held it to be. The controversy surrounding its release, a controversy whose vigor seems puzzling in light of its evident fiction, says much about a general public willingness to imagine horrors in unlikely places.

One of the most striking things about Snuff 's closing footage is its appearance of having occurred in some anonymous location. It is set at once in a flat in New York City and a South American mansion; the awkwardness of the match cut that precedes it gives it the feel of passing through a kind of time warp. This placelessness, probably a function of hasty editing on limited resources, still has much to do with why it inspired such controversy and such an enduring belief in its authenticity. Despite appearances, the scene did occur in a specific place: Carter Stevens' flat in Manhattan. Mr. Stevens spoke with us about the process of making the scene, the motivation behind it, and about his theory as to why it caused the uproar that it did.

Mike Ward: Initially I want to talk a little bit about what you remember about the circumstances around the making of the movie and what the environment was like back then. What were you working on before -- it was Alan Shackleton who approached you about making the movie initially, right?

Carter Stevens: Yeah. Alan was a small-time distributor in New York. We were actually working -- I was working with him on an R-rated parody of Star Trek. Unfortunately, in the middle of our preproduction, Paramount decided they were going to make the Star Trek movie, at which point the lawyers reversed themselves. Up 'til then, they said that Paramount couldn't do anything, but at that point -- well, if Paramount's making a movie, then they have a good case against us. Because we would be lowering the worth of their trademark. So the movie was scrapped. I was working with Alan on that, at that time.

MW: A part of the [ Slaughter ] project seemed to be about cost-recovery.

CS: Yeah, exactly. It was made -- I don't know who made it, I mean who backed it originally. But Roberta [Findlay] and her husband made it in South America, it never got released, Alan bought it with the idea -- when "snuff" became a big buzzword, all the sudden it was in all the media. And so Alan was a consummate showman, I mean he really was. He had a talent for exploitation. And so he bought the rights to the picture and hired a crew to shoot the ending, and released it with incredible bally-hoo. True story, I mean so help me God -- the day it opened, at the National Theater, there were pickets and news crews and people coming on television decrying it, all sorts of things. I called Alan, and asked him how much the picketers cost to hire. [laughs.] And there was like dead silence, for ten seconds, and then: " I didn't hire them. I was gonna hire some." He says, "but they came out themselves. I don't know where they came from."

MW: Apparently, some of this bally-hoo was a little bit manufactured.

CS: Well, yeah, most of it was. I mean that's the thing, most of it was. It was just -- it was funny because there was almost shock in his voice. " I didn't hire 'em. I was gonna hire 'em." But he was -- you know, he was a little shocked --

MW: At the extent of the reaction to it?

CS: Oh, yeah.

MW: So what exactly was your role in doing those last five minutes?

CS: I had a studio. I was producing and directing porn at that time, and I had a loft on 29th Street, in Chelsea. And we had converted it into what in the film business is called an insert studio, in that it wasn't -- you know, it was a small space, it was suitable for shooting commercials, little films, that kind of thing. You could build one set. And shoot there. And Alan basically rented it, and they built a replica of the room that was in the last -- as close as possible for little or no money -- a replica of the room that was in the last scene of Slaughter . And hired a crew. Simon Nocturn was the director, he had a small commercial house in New York, and they came in, they had a special effects man, whose name I do not remember at this point, it's been so many years. But he claimed that he was the man who had developed the "revolving piano" bit, a magic illusion. I don't know if you've ever seen --

MW: No, that doesn't sound familiar to me.

CS: It's a piano that rises, and then it revolves. He claims to have developed that. So the guy who was doing the special effects claimed to have been the person who created that illusion. Um, he also did -- he also had another illusion, driving a nail into your skull -- into your nose, your nostril. I don't remember him claiming that he'd invented that, though. He just did it for my -- my kids were there that weekend. It was funny because Sunday we were going to a Star Trek convention so I had my kids who were 12, 13 at the time. They were running around the studio, watching all this.

MW: You were quoted [in Killing for Culture ] as saying that everyone was sort of laughing hysterically during the shooting of this thing, which is certainly interesting, given the mood of it, you know, on film...

CS: Well, my kids were. My kids were having a great old time. I mean we were working. You know, I don't think the people involved were -- well, there was a lot of jocularity. Let's put it that way. It wasn't being taken very seriously. But it was a job, so I mean it wasn't done as a lark. But my kids -- I remember the effects man had a sheep's head with the skin taken off. They were gonna do -- I don't know if, I don't think it made it into the final film but they were gonna do a thing slicing an eyeball...

MW: Naw, that never made it in there.

CS: Yeah. I didn't think it came out. The effects were not great...

MW: No. [laughs] No, actually, I'm glad you said that because...

CS: The whole thing was done in one day.

MW: Right. You had sort-of an interesting problem presented to you, I think, because this -- the remainder of the film, Slaughter, had finished off in -- I'm not exactly sure what the circumstances were but obviously it was shot in Argentina and you had this -- the last scene was shot in this kind-of mansion, you know, and you had to match that up with this loft in Manhattan, which is a very difficult problem coming out of the gate. And then you had these budgetary restraints, too. So it's interesting that with those problems, and in combination with the makeup effects, which, you know, had some problems, that it worked as well as it did.

CS: Yeah. It was funny because a few months later I was having dinner in Cafe Luna down in Little Italy and there were two couples having dinner behind us. I almost choked on my spaghetti because this guy's going on and on about this movie. He saw it, and it was real, he wanted to call the police, he wanted -- and I'm dying, because the effects were so bad . I mean, at one point -- the phony arm was attached at the wrist and her hand, and then his hand is holding it down to cover the joint. His hand is over her wrist, and he's sawing through this arm with the jigsaw -- as a matter of fact I still have the jigsaw, it was one of our power tools that we used to build the set [laughs]. They just grabbed it -- they needed something to cut through. So he cut through this thing and the arm is severed from the hand and the blood's gushing out, and meantime the hand is still grabbing at the other hand. Anybody knows -- it's not like a frog's leg. You cut it off, it's dead, that's it. You know, in the meantime her hand is still squeezing away after it's been totally severed and the arm's, you know, gushing blood, everything.

MW: I remember also that the -- when he's pulling her guts out right at the very end, and she's sort-of twitching around, and I have this funny feeling that in real life, whatever exactly that means, that somebody wouldn't be twitching around like that. But I think it's partly that twitching that makes it sort-of work.

CS: Interesting story: right about when we were doing that scene -- by then, I mean it had started at eight o'clock in the morning, and by then it had to be two or three a.m. the next morning. I mean this was a long shoot. But it had to be, it was well after midnight, and the woman who was playing the victim panicked. She jumped up, threw up all -- I mean she was laying in a hollowed-out hole cut in the foam, and the phony body was laid on top of her and attached somewhere at the chest level. And then he climbs on top of her and acts like he's gonna -- she had a panic attack. She was convinced that he was really gonna kill her. She ran into the kitchen, which is our green room, and it took us about 15 minutes to calm her down. You know: "this guy is crazy, he's really gonna do it, he's really gonna do it." And he had to come in and say, "Hey, I'm acting, you know? I'm just an actor." And even I got in, and said, "Look, my kids are here. You know, we're not gonna kill somebody." But it was just, it was a long day, tired and, uh --

MW: I imagine that's a fairly physically uncomfortable position to be in, too.

CS: Yeah, I mean, the guy was straddling her with a kitchen knife.

MW: Right. You see the movie again, and I guess what I'm getting at, is -- a part of the reason why I think it works despite all these problems with it is that the performances seem like they're so much better than what came before with the Findlay movie, and it makes somebody wonder whether there was something going on behind the scenes with the filming to get people sort-of in a method acting kind of --

CS: No, they were just two fairly good actors. I mean all the rest of the people really were crew. I mean for the pullback shot -- that is the crew. Everybody was drafted.

MW: Right after the movie came out -- obviously there was a fairly intense period there when there's a lot of debate over whether somebody had been killed, and it actually attracted the attention of the Manhattan district attorney at the time, who I think is still in office. Do you remember anything about that, whether you actually got nervous over whether you thought you might get in trouble?

CS: I had -- you got to understand my background, it's very technical. My degree is in photographic science from RIT. And I had run afoul with the law over my porno. I'd been arrested at one point for Collegiates -- no, I'm sorry, for Lickety-Split, which -- were had just did a big porn, and I had gotten busted. And eventually the corporation pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.

MW: These are just obscenity charges?

CS: Yeah. Lickety-Split was a very big film in New York, and the moral squad busted the theater and eventually I was charged with "obscenity-slash-manufacture." And like I say, we took a plea -- the corporation pleaded guilty and all personal charges were dropped.

MW: This would have been in the 1960s?

CS: No, it was around '71.

MW: So it was before Deep Throat ?

CS: Well, actually, it was right after Deep Throat . I'm sorry, no, Lickety-Split was about two years later, it had to be around '73. Collegiates , which was my first film, was around '71. Lickety-Split was around '73, '74. [Note: the filmography on smnews.com dates these films as 1973 and 1974, respectively. The graduation of hardcore pornography from stag parties to commercial movie houses is often linked to the release of Deep Throat , which came out in 1972.] But anyway, because of that I met, or made the acquaintance of, a couple of the police on the moral squad who arrested me. And when this whole snuff thing started, I was called by them to take a look at a couple of films and give them my opinion. These were 8mm loops and they were incredibly badly made, and totally phony, not at all -- I looked at 'em and pointed out to them why, you know -- the camera tricks that were used. The fact that you cut away -- you were obviously not dealing with snuff films. Just for the record, they've never found a real snuff film.

MW: That's my understanding also, yeah.

CS: I'm positive that they exist, especially after the advent of the video tape recorder, but I'm just as convinced that they've never been sold -- and they're not floating around on the market.

MW: So you think the mechanisms around that are somewhat different from -- I mean, how do you think they're shown?

CS: I don't think they are shown. I think they're the same as any -- sooner or later, some serial killer is gonna surface and his trophies are gonna be videotapes he's made.

MW: Right. Apparently, it's gotten close. There are people out there who've made audio tapes and that kind of thing.

CS: Right. Exactly. But I don't think that you'll ever find one being sold. I just don't believe it. Pornography is made for profit. People who make kiddie porn, and make snuff films, don't care about money. They're trophies. In fact, the only way anybody's gonna have one is gonna be for trade. But anyway, what happened was that when Snuff came out somebody called me. The cops, and I had a whole set of photographs which I had taken during the shoot. Which I later sold to a couple of magazines, they've been printed, I honestly don't remember the names of the magazines but I sold 'em a couple of times. You know, it was mostly of the special effects. But they did investigate, you know, took 'em all of an hour to find out --

MW: Well, all you have to do is find out that the woman's still alive, apparently, and that's what the DA did. Didn't take too long, you know, because as long as she's there and speaking, then you know. So -- I'm not sure if I asked you this before, why do you think it worked so well? I mean we're talking about something that's really gone down in history as one of these --

CS: What?

MW: -- very basic, successful hoaxes. I mean it's compared to "War of the Worlds," the Orson Welles broadcast of the '30s.

CS: [laughs] Well, you're tapping the same horror, you're tapping the same fear. You know, it's -- you're next. You can't get more basic than that. And it's senseless death. What all horror films are based on. It could happen to me. It's the bottom line, you know?

MW: This is a question that maybe gets beyond your purview and more into what the producers were thinking, but -- did it have to be Slaughter ? Was Slaughter the movie that had to have these five minutes appended to it? Because there's a certain sense in which you could do that to any movie.

CS: No! It was -- we had Slaughter , Slaughter was available for five grand. I mean, how often do you find a movie -- a distributor that you can buy that cheap, you know? I mean, he paid next to nothing for the movie. I'm sorry -- I think he might have paid like 2500 for it. But, uh, it cost him about five grand to shoot the end sequence, you know? Regardless -- the whole thing, with advertising and everything else, he probably got that film released into the National Theater on Broadway, the number one theater in the country, for under a hundred thousand dollars. Way under a hundred thousand. My guess would be under fifty.

The National Theater was a first-release theater, you were talking A-pictures, multimillion-dollar pictures playing there. I don't think Alan ever, in his wildest imagination, dreamed of having that picture play the National Theater, Broadway. I think he was thinking of releasing it into a porno theater, on 42nd Street, around the corner. All right? Alan was a low-budget distributor -- exploitation films, that kind of thing. I don't think he actually distributed hardcore porn, he might have distributed softcore. That's probably where he knew Roberta from. But he was probably hoping to maybe double his money over the space of a year. Instead of the space of a week. It was just at the right time, and the right place, and going to the National was unheard of for that kind of a film. They didn't even play cheapo horror films. I mean that was a Gone With the Wind type of theater. To get in there with a film - let's put it this way. Most of the films that opened there probably had an advertising budget more than Alan spent totally. Their advertising budget the week it opened was probably more than Alan spent on producing, distributing, and everything else.

MW: Did you have any interaction with, there were a lot of picketers and that kind of thing --

CS: I just saw it on the news that morning and called Alan, and said "Jesus." I've really gotta say he seemed bemused by the whole thing. The insert that we did was -- I don't wanna call it, it wasn't amateurish. But certainly, the special effects weren't that good. If you look at it, the body -- I mean, when he cuts off the arm it's very phony-looking, in another scene he takes a pair of pliers or something, or clippers, and cuts off her finger. And that last scene where she's lying there -- I mean that body looks so dead. I mean, it's attached to her just above the, right about at the breastbone, but if you look at it -- she's at this weird angle, she's lying there and the thing's on top of her. And from the chest down, that body never moved .

MW: He had kinda opened up her shirt, and it kinda just looks like this shirt with a whole bunch of stuff sorta stuffed into it --

CS: Well, I think mostly it was pig and sheep intestines, that they had bought at the market that morning. I started to tell you, the funniest thing was the fact that he had -- the special effects man had this sheep's head which was stripped of skin, and they were gonna use it. And he was pulling it out, and everybody in the crew was going, "oh, God," you know, "put it away." My kids were running around and they thought it was hysterical. The kids just thought it was funny as hell, this ugly-lookin' thing. And the rest of it, it was hog's intestines. Mostly it was a lot of phony blood, Karo's syrup and food coloring. Sticky and smelly. They had a couple of mannequins and they stuffed 'em full of beef and gristle and a couple of plastic tubes. And he had a big bucket of blood underneath that he bumped so it looked like stuff spurted through the -- when they cut the arms. I mean it was a one-day shoot, you know? It was as fast and dirty as it had to be in order to do it under budget. Considering the budget it was a pretty damn good job.

MW: During the actual filming, were you kind-of standing on the sidelines or --

CS: I was there, yeah -- it was my studio. I was providing -- you know, we provided the lighting equipment, I helped the gaffer move the lights. I mean this was a nonunion shoot, you know? Everybody did everything, down to my -- the cleaning the kitchen after lunch. My girlfriend cleaned the kitchen. I did a little of everything. I was practically a production assistant, a gopher. In that it was my studio, they were using all my equipment.

MW: So you were sort-of watching Simon Nocturn at work. What did he do to get these performances out of these actors? Was there any sort of -?

CS: Not that I remember. We're talking, you know, one-take wonders. There really wasn't that much -- it was more self-preparation. Biggest thing he did was calm that girl down. She said that this guy was gonna kill her, that we were all in on it, I mean she just had a panic attack. She'd just spent like twenty hours --

MW: It also makes me wonder whether the performers -- I mean obviously the performers knew what they were doing, and that this was about recreating a snuff film, or faking a snuff film, and whether that created some anxiety with them, too.

CS: They were both union actors. They were good, working actors. They weren't, you know, people off the street. Guy came in, he prepared, I remember him working himself up to do "crazy." And in fact as I say, he had to come down and calm her down. Convince her that it was just acting, that he wasn't out of his mind, completely nuts. But you know, he took -- bugged his eyes and drooled [laughs].

MW: And this whole panic attack thing happened before the pulling-out-the-intestines scene was shot?

CS: Yeah. Well, I think that we were setting up for that. But I mean she just -- you know, it had been twenty hours nonstop, everybody was exhausted. And she just, all of the sudden -- the kid was a better actor than she thought, I think. You know? She just panicked. She was convinced that this was real, and the whole thing was set up so that we could kill her. That we were all in on it, everybody knew except her. I mean, she was, you know -- she was brainwashed herself, by the publicity.

MW: Is -- I did some work trying to dig up Simon Nocturn, where he is now. Do you have any sense of where he is?

CS: No, I haven't seen Simon in 15, 20 years.

MW: What about either of the performers?

CS: Never knew them -- I don't even remember their names. Simon hired them. He did all the interviewing, casting. As I say, this was a one-day thing. You know? Couple of days building, painting, and setup, and one day shooting, and me and my girlfriend and my kids took off for Washington for a Star Trek convention. Came back and cleaned up the studio a couple of days later.

MW: Yeah, I imagine it was fairly messy after all that.

CS: Well, hey, we had a cleaning crew came in. That was part of the budget, cleaning up all that crap.

MW: I'm wondering whether you have any sort of help that you could provide me in terms of digging up any of these other people who were involved in it.

CS: I really don't. I did not have any of the paperwork involved. If it was one of my films, sure, I would have them in my records, because I'm anal that way, but I really didn't provide any of the services or do any of the paperwork. Of course, Alan dropped dead jogging in Central Park years ago. Not long after that, actually... couldn't have been more than two years after this whole thing. Jogging, had a massive heart attack.

MW: I guess that's sort-of appropriate given the whole mythology surrounding it, now I have no -- all the trails are cold.

CS: As far as I know, he's the only one that got struck down. [laughs.] So I mean it must have all been his fault. No, I think he just got sucked into the health, running craze at that time.