Killing For Culture Documentary Announced
THE LAST MILLENNIUM is not that long ago but it may as well be the stone age. In the early 1990s, David Slater and I were working together on the book, Killing for Culture, amidst cultural and societal upheaval. A new millennium was on the near horizon, and a deep sense of unease and insecurity clutched society because of it. Many thought the world was going to end — literally, Biblically — as prophesied by doomsayers with each new millennium through the ages. Others feared that the banks and infrastructure would collapse, including government, who issued “Y2K” warnings.
Killing for Culture can be considered a reaction to its environment as much as it fed on it. In hindsight, we didn’t quite know what it was we were doing, beyond exhuming strange and obscure movies. Neither of us vocalised whether the book would have wider appeal, although the book now seems perfectly logical given the circumstances, the manifestation of strange archetypes in that the fear and insecurity of the age shadows its pages.
When asked to give interviews and commentary relating to the book, it invariably leads to the most notorious, albeit simplistic question raised by the book: Do snuff films exist? That question mattered pre-millennium, a time of physical media. In the early 2000s, David and I revised and updated Killing for Culture, primarily to address the new millennium. Having ‘survived the end of the world,’ the world has changed — technology, mass communication, etc —and the dominant question needs to be reframed accordingly, becoming a jumping off point.
We are delighted to be involved with Severin Films in bringing Killing for Culture to the screen. Their appreciation of, and investment in cult film and fandom makes them the natural, most exciting choice, for the project. The result promises to be an unflinching exploration of the ideas and themes of the book.
The film will be directed by Kier-La Janisse (Award-winner Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, 2021), with Severin co-founder David Gregory (Tales of the Uncanny, 2020) producing.
How the option came about:
It was the latter project that prompted Janisse to pursue an adaptation of Killing for Culture; as part of the Black Emanuelle box set she was in the midst of producing a featurette on snuff films — a central plotline in Emanuelle in America, and for which Killing for Culture’s David Kerekes was an interviewee — and the idea arose to expand it to a standalone feature. “I had started doing interviews and there was just too much interesting material,” Janisse explains, “And while there is a great deal of scholarship around snuff films, all of it is greatly indebted to the work of David Kerekes, whose publishing house Headpress has released several key texts on this topic. And so the idea of a formal partnership between Headpress and Severin was hatched, and our planned featurette on snuff films for the Emanuelle in America blu ray became the feature film adaptation of Killing for Culture.”
End of transmission. 53 seconds represents the period of delay.
David Kerekes
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