Unlike images of sex, which were clandestine and screened only in private, images of death were made public from the onset of cinema. The father of the modern age, Thomas Edison, fed the appetite for this material with staged executions on film. Little over a century later the executions are real and the world is aghast at brutalities freely available online at the click of a button. Some of these films are created by lone individuals using shaky camera phones: Luka Magnotta, for instance, and the teenagers known as the Dnipropetrovsk maniacs. Others are shot on high definition equipment, scripted and professionally edited by organized groups, such as the militant extremists known as Isis.

Killing for Culture explores these images of death and violence, and the human obsession with looking — and not looking — at them. Beginning with the mythology of the so-called ‘snuff’ film and its evolution through popular culture, this book traces death and the artifice of death in the ‘mondo’ documentaries that emerged in the 1960s, and later the faux snuff pornography that found an audience through Necrobabes and similar websites. However, it is when videos depicting the murders of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg surfaced in the 2000s that an era of genuine atrocity commenced, one that has irrevocably changed the way in which we function as a society.

Killing for Culture is a compelling and thought-provoking book, fully revised and expanded since its publication in the (pre-Internet) nineties to critical and public acclaim.

• First published in the 1990s to critical and commercial acclaim, Killing for Culture, one of the most influential of modern (film) texts has a complete makeover.
• Long out of print, the previous edition was ‘pre-internet’, giving some idea of the wealth of new material in this revised and updated edition.
• Achingly topical and up to date: streaming militant propaganda is viewed by millions and the source of major news stories.
• Discusses the most enduring of modern mythologies, the ‘snuff’ film.