Mondo Horror: Carnivalizing the Taboo

Mikita Brottman, Maryland Institute College of Art


The kind of film that has come to be known as the “mondo movie” first became popular in the 1960s, when films like Mondo Balordo (1964), Mondo Bizarro (1966), Mondo Freudo (1966), and Taboos of the World (1963) tried to capitalize on the huge success of the seminal mondo film, Mondo Cane (1962). The mondo films of the 1960s featured (often-faked) catalogues of bizarre practices from around the globe, such as dog eating in the Philippines, tribal fertility rituals, and South American cargo cults. The new mondo movies of the last two decades, however, are far more vivid and explicit than the films comprising the original bandwagon of the 1960s.
These new mondo films consist of compiled camera footage of murders, suicides, accidents, assassinations and other real-life disasters. The mondo films of the last two decades, such as True Gore (1987), Shocks (1989), Video Violence (1986/7), Savage Zone (1985), and Near Death (1989), are composed of unedited police and news camera footage too graphic to be shown on television. This includes film of the race riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1993, and footage of the Heysel Stadium disaster in Belgium, when soccer fans from Liverpool went on the rampage, attacking and killing their rivals from Juventas. It also includes footage of police raids, shootings, stakeouts, air crashes, and vehicle wrecks. 
            Other mondo compilation films, such as The End (1972), the Faces of Death series (1978, 1981, 1985, 1990), The Killing of America (1981), the Death Scenes series (1989, 1992), Executions (1995) and Of the Dead (1999) rely more heavily on amateur or police camera work, Vietnam war footage, stills of murder and suicide victims, and close-ups of dead bodies. The footage is occasionally held together by a loose documentary-style commentary, but is more often left to speak for itself, or is backed up by an appropriate (or sometimes deliberately inappropriate) musical soundtrack.
           Originating in the U.S., the mondo film has a massive following on the mail-order and underground movie circuit, and such films are also produced in Europe, China, Japan (Shocking Asia), Africa (Africa Blood and Guts), and elsewhere. Certain popular “classic” clips or sequences of footage-such as the Kennedy assassination and the Hillsborough Stadium disaster (when overcrowding in the stands led to the deaths of more than one hundred soccer fans)-show up again and again, from film to film.
In a number of significant ways, the mondo movie can be seen as the “other” of the mainstream horror film, its images understood as catalogues of nervous disorders and psychotic symptoms: the repressed complexes of the “sanctioned” horror film narrative.  In its focus solely on the moment of “real” human death, the mondo movie is the “hidden” version of the mainstream horror film. Of course, a killing simulated with the latest techniques in special effects can represent bodily disintegration and dismemberment far more vividly (and possibly even more credibly) than if death were “real.” But the mainstream horror movie, however technically well developed, however graphic and plausible its images,  can never reveal the violation of the physical body in the same way that mondo can show “actual” human death.
Although it has generally been ignored by those writers who are interested in the horror genre, the mondo film provides a fierce critique of the traditional horror film; it takes the form of an externalized diagnosis of the many sicknesses successfully repressed by such movies. In its terrifying carnivalization of the site of the body, the spasm of death, and of that moment in which horror merges with laughter, the mondo movie-for those able to appreciate its progressive nature-fulfills all the functions of the sanctioned horror film narrative, but more explicitly, more offensively, and more defiantly.

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 Mondo films are highly sought after by fans of the genre, but may be rather difficult to get hold of, especially outside the U.S. In addition to people interested in “true crime” and criminology, and those interested in Satanism and the occult, the audience for mondo films tends to be comprised of primarily teens and young adults, mainly males. Essentially, this is the same group of thrill-seeking adolescent boys that provides the audience for the traditional horror film, a demographic connection that suggests an important relationship between both kinds of movie, at least in terms of audience motives for viewing.
Since the audience of the mondo film is predominantly teenaged (or slightly older) and predominantly male, it seems clear that such movies speak deeply to male anxieties and desires. Clearly, the watching of such films, like the watching of horror movies, functions as a rite of passage for the adolescent male, warning of the consequences of socially inappropriate behavior. Barbara Creed argues that the central ideological project of the horror movie is purification of the object through a “descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct” (Creed 1993, 71). In this way, she argues, the horror movie brings about a confrontation with the object (the corpse, bodily wastes) in order, finally, to eject the abject and redraw the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman. Like the horror movie, the mondo film tells the story of broken taboos, or chaos and disequilibrium, directly in order to reinforce the taboos and social equilibrium of the world outside the film. In other words, the mondo movie is a stabilizing narrative, developed to form and acculturate the adolescent male.
Psychologist Dolf Zillman has provided some interesting insight into the dynamics of the audience for violent films. He explains that adolescent males have a lot to gain, socially speaking, by exhibiting “fearlessness” before their peers, a factor that may also help account for the popularity of the mondo film. Zillman demonstrates that young men enjoy horror more in the company of squeamish others, particularly girls, than in the company of other self-assured, fearless young males. He explains that “specific social conditions under which exposure to the displays in question occurs are apparently capable of exerting a degree of influence that can make intrinsically distressing displays enjoyable, even amusing” (199).
           Another reason why the mondo movie is seen as especially appropriate and meaningful to the adolescent audience is because it reenacts, in a narrative fashion, the alienation many adolescents feel from their changing bodies, pathologized as monstrous, outlandish, and stigmatized. In the mondo movie, as in the horror film, terror grows from the fear that we are forever bound to the weak, animalistic part of our bodies, which may turn on us any minute and reveal us to be nonhuman. The unease and uncertainty that many-if not all-adolescents feel towards their rapidly re-forming bodies is literalized in the mondo film’s narrative of bodily fragmentation, dismemberment, and collapse.

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The traditional horror movie has attracted a great deal of interest in the fields of film and cultural studies ever since the publication of Ivan Butler’s The Horror Film in 1967. Earlier writers on filmic representations of horror tended to concentrate on the horror “classics,” such as Frankenstein, Dracula, or King Kong, rather than more “downmarket” movies, which did not attract much critical focus until the publication of Robin Wood’s essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” in 1979. Since then, however, different kinds of “neglected” horror films have attracted a flood of critical attention, although the mondo film still remains completely taboo.
Critics have claimed considerable social and cultural significance for the horror movie. The overdetermination of symbols and archaic references in both the traditional horror film foregrounds its relationship with folklore, early literature, and the oral story, as do its free exchange of themes and motifs, archetypal characters and situations, and the accumulation of sequels, remakes and imitations. Claude Lévi-Strauss has argued that cultural narratives are the direct representation of a shared psychic problematic, shared on the basis of the dominant group’s regulation of common obsessions through repetition in re-presentation (Lévi-Strauss 1984). Stephen Prince regards the horror movie as a compulsive symbolic exchange in which members of a social order nervously affirm the importance of their cultural heritage (Prince 1988). He believes that the horror film is concerned with the social aspects of both individual and group identity when it addresses the persistent question of what must be done in order to remain human.
This critical fascination with horror seems to have arisen because the horror film belongs to a subgenre almost universally dismissed as trivial, valueless, or “just entertainment.” Robin Wood claims that the popular dismissal of the horror movie as “just entertainment” allows it to present repressed material, as do jokes and dreams, in such a way as to appeal directly to our unconscious, without having to bypass the psychic censor. Yet if the low quality of the horror film is regarded as an index of its cultural significance, why has so little critical attention been paid to the mondo movie, whose filmic quality is often the least important element of its structure?
     Most of the critics writing on the traditional horror believe they have stumbled upon a critically neglected yet essentially radical genre, whose dismissal as “inconsequential” or “lacking in value” allows it to exert a considerably progressive influence. It had been at least twenty-five years, however, since the horror movie has been considered a critically neglected genre; the last quarter century has seen an increasing number of articles and critical studies on all kinds of horror films. Moreover, many of the so-called “taboo” horror movies that have garnered the most academic attention are actually the work of very mainstream Hollywood directors, including John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Sean S. Cunningham and Brian DaPalma. Not only are has the horror film become socially acceptable, movies that were once considered radical and taboo, like Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are now considered classic masterpieces of the genre.   
It seems ridiculous to claim that any horror movie today is “repressed” or “taboo.” To make such an argument is to use the horror films as a scapegoat to avoid dealing with films that are less predictable, less familiar, less easy to categorize. Academic and critical fascination with the horror movie conveniently diverts interest from the kind of cinema nobody wants to talk about: the mondo film. To explain how the mondo movie functions as the “other” as the traditional horror film, it is important to consider some individual examples of mondo movies in more detail.

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         One of the more thoughtful and fascinating examples of the mondo genre is Sheldon Renan’s film The Killing of America, produced by Mataichiro Yamamoto and Leonard Schraeder (brother of more famous screenwriter Paul). Unlike many similar examples of mondo, The Killing of America includes a documentary-style script that attempts to provide some kind of commentary on the footage being presented to us-rather than simply linking shots according to circumstances of death (assassination, murder, suicide), like other films do, or connecting unrelated footage by means of a suitable soundtrack. If The Killing of America is somewhat more intelligent and self-conscious than the average example of mondo, it is representative of the genre in its horror-film obsession with open-wound sequences, its use of slow-motion repeats, and its unflinching presentation of graphically disintegrating human bodies.
              The Killing of America opens with a grim promise, with the words printed on the screen as they are spoken, as though for extra emphasis: “All the film you are about to see is real. Nothing has been staged.” The documentary-style voiceover then goes on to relate a series of crime statistics: that America has 27,000 murders a year, that it is the only country in the world to have a higher murder rate than countries at civil war (such as Cambodia and Nicaragua), that it produces a murder victim every twenty minutes, and so forth. The voiceover backs up footage of police shootings, scenes of bodies lying on slabs in a mortuary, and incidents of extreme violence at race riots. The following section incorporates film of the attempted assassination of President Reagan, during which a secret serviceman is lifted off his feet by a bullet in the stomach-this is shown several times, and in slow-motion-followed by slow-motion footage of the Kennedy assassination from a number of different angles. The shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald is also shown in slow-motion, as are the race riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, police street shootings, and the killings at Kent State University in Ohio, where the army opened fire on students protesting against the Vietnam War.
               This section also includes U.S. soldiers shooting Vietnamese civilians-in particular, a close-up shooting in the head and a close-up of the dead body-as well as George Wallace (Nixon’s electoral rival) being shot in the back of the head (in slow motion), the assassination of Robert Kennedy, and a (brief) contemporary interview with his assassin, the Islamic fundamentalist Sirhan Sirhan. We are also show security camera shots of a supermarket holdup and shooting in slow motion and close-up, stills of murder victims, footage of a large hotel fire, and film of on-camera suicides, with people throwing themselves from buildings, hanging themselves, and shooting themselves in the head, followed by close-up stills of the dead bodies.
          The next section of the film moves on to chart the rise of the serial killer, with the documentary voiceover condemning the lenience of prison sentences, the madness of the urban streets, and the frightening yearly crime statistics. Film in this section includes footage of an urban sniper, photos of his body after the police have shot him, and the photos of bodies of his victims. We are also shown footage of “Son of Sam” serial killer David Berkowitz in police custody and the Jonestown massacre, a mass cult suicide in Guyana (with authentic soundtrack). This is followed by footage of a terrorist taking over a television station and taking the newscaster hostage, serial killer Ted Bundy in court, an interview with Ed Kemper, “the co-ed killer,” on death row describing his killings, the exhumation of the bodies of murder victims, more police shootings in slow motion, open-wound sequences, and close-ups of dead bodies. The film ends with the words: “while you were watching this film, five more of us were murdered. One was the random killing of a stranger.”
         The Killing of America is an arresting film. Even though these “live” deaths are generally much less vivid and drawn-out than the graphic technicolor axings and knifings of fictive instances of the horror film, what really shocks in the mondo film is a combination of the sheer numbers of killings witnessed, along with the frisson of shock in the realization that what is being shown-however unsteady the camerawork and picture quality-is really happening “in the flesh.” What is especially absorbing about this film in particular is the strongly reactionary and moralistic tone of its documentary voice (criticizing the unlimited availability of weapons, sympathizing with police problems, and so forth), coupled uneasily with a compulsion to repeat particularly disturbing images again and again, in slow motion, and from a variety of different angles.
The typical piece of mondo cinema-like the Death  Scenes series, for example-comes to terms with its presentation of gratuitous violence in a generally unproblematic way, through the use of an explanatory, deadpan voiceover (or, as often, blankly descriptive subtitles). This uncomfortable juxtaposition of a paternalistic, moralizing voiceover with an obvious voyeuristic relish in the most brutal scenes of bodily fragmentation gives the final impression of a film not really at ease with itself, its direction, or its intent.

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        A movie far more successful in coming to terms with its own purpose and design is the blistering Death Scenes, produced by Nick Bougas, written by Nick Bougas and F.B. Vincenzo and released by Wavelength Productions, a Californian corporation, in 1989. Death Scenes is introduced and narrated by the famous occultist and leader of the Church of Satan, Dr. Anton Szandor LaVey, who describes the film in his wandering introduction as “a road map featuring the many avenues by which we encounter death … a brutally graphic collection of horrid indiscretions, a true necronomicon.” “What mysterious force draws us to such a dark, challenging subject?” inquires LaVey in his sardonic monotone. “That is a question that you, the viewer, must ask yourself, for you have chosen to join me in this universal participatory ritual, this tour of relentless human folly.”
          The film is basically a catalogue of grisly police photographs from death scenes in 1930s and 40s Los Angeles, arranged according to manner of death. LaVey, a spectacularly deadpan narrator, explains the circumstances of the death presented in each picture, all the time backed up by psychotic organ music. The first section of Death Scenes-suicides-includes still photographs of bodies killed by shotgun blasts, dynamite, self-immolation, carbon monoxide poisoning, hanging, hara kiri, the slashing of veins, and starvation. The second section-murder-suicides-includes photographs of death by evisceration, bludgeoning, torture, drowning, stabbing, and decapitation. The film’s chief segment presents graphic photographs of murder scenes, including bodies found in trunks; bodies with their throats slashed, bodies that have been burned, beaten, and battered to death; mafia shotgun murders; more decapitations; child murders; the victims of sex crimes; policemen killed in action; and a selection of discarded and mutilated torsos.
The penultimate series-accidents-includes the bodies of a dentist and his patient killed by the inhalation of nitrous oxide, bodies killed in fires, and a catalogue of auto wrecks. The film concludes with footage of war scenes, military executions, and scenes from prisoner-of-war camps. Death Scenes runs for roughly eighty minutes, includes over eight hundred photographs, and was popular enough to lead to a number of successful sequels.
        What makes Death Scenes a more unified and integral a film than The Killing of America is its unflinching attitude toward the violent deaths of the exhibited cadavers. Instead of the didactic and condemnatory voiceover so at odds with The Killing of America’s perverse repetition of footage, Death Scenes includes a soundtrack and direction that are clearly at ease with the film’s chief purpose: to shock and thrill the voyeur. The careful montage of photographs ensures that the viewer does not become overwhelmed; instead, the narrative pitch is allowed to build in intensity, reserving the most harrowing images until the end of each sequence, and leaving the viewer with a morbid anticipation of what will be next. The background circus organ music, rather than detracting from this intensity, serves to enhance the film’s mood of uncanny abandon. Much of this is due to the words and narrative delivery of LaVey, whose wry summary of each death scene is laconic without verging on the droll. He concludes his dark narrative with a brief rhetorical coda:

      Ladies and Gentlemen, what, if anything, is to be gained by reviewing this grim series of images?
      Do we find further proof that crime does not pay, or a greater realization? Only through the bold
      confrontation with man and his mortality can we fully comprehend the importance of living life to
      its fullest, to pursue in true fashion the admirable goal of life with honor, death with dignity.
 

 Much of Anton LaVey’s voiceover in Death Scenes takes on a wryly playful vein. Without ever being openly vulgar or distasteful, his gently ironic account of each corpse’s decease succeeds in cynically mocking the dignity of the human body and all the taboos and rituals with which we surround its collapse and demise. LaVey remarks on the “inventive approaches” of “over-ambitious” suicides, for whom “commonplace firearms did not suffice,” points out “a sterling example of matricide,” “a remarkably brutal bludgeoning,” and notes how one woman’s head has been “cleaved neatly in two.”
 He describes the suicide of a legal client who slew his incompetent attorney as “moving for a dismissal of his own design.” “Objection sustained,” he comments on a similar scenario, “as yet another disgruntled client vents his wrath on two attorneys whom he felt mishandled his defense.” The assailant who murdered a Japanese man for thirty cents and his wristwatch is described by LaVey as currently “killing time” in San Quentin. A woman is bludgeoned and dumped outside a laundry by her lover because “she declared their romance was all washed up,” and the bloody tableau of a man murdered by the owner of a corner food stand over payment of a ten-cent hot dog is referred to by LaVey as “a sight few would relish.”
          It is perhaps significant that the part of the body that is represented most vividly in Death Scenes, as in the Faces of Death series, is the face and head. Mondo is replete with images of faces torn open, heads blown up, mouths, ears and noses draining blood. One image in Death Scenes shows us a man who has shot himself in the head with a revolver and whose separated brain has left his body and sits on the floor, right at the forefront of the picture. “Curiously,” remarks LaVey, “the brain which had made the frantic decision to kill only a few moments before now lies peacefully in plain view on the planks of an old wooden porch.”
    Another image of a car accident victim presents us with a truncated torso whose decapitated head lies some yards away, face upwards, in the middle of the road. “Of all the car crashes on view in our source,” comments LaVey, “this one is undoubtedly the most novel. This decapitated head landed neatly in the center of the road with a serene facial expression which totally belies the obvious fury of the crash.” Other tableaux present monstrous visions of facial collapse, like so many broken masks.

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         An execution by firing squad is followed by screams, the sound of police sirens, and radio static. Various shouts and cried of horror are followed by color stills of bodies mangled by car accidents and video footage of bodies leaping from a burning building as alarm bells ring and ambulance lights flash. A brief glimpse of news out-takes from the Hillsborough disaster is followed by a clip of Vic Morrow’s death on the set of John Landis’s section of the movie The Twilight Zone. This is followed by footage of Marilyn Monroe pouting and blowing kisses at the camera, juxtaposed with a still of her bloated dead body lying on a slab in the morgue. Over the image of a skull is superimposed the words of the film’s title: Death Scenes 2.
        Produced by the same team responsible for the original Death Scenes, Death Scenes 2, in both black-and-white and color, was released by Wavelength Productions in 1992. Sharing-in certain places-the same psychotic calliope soundtrack of the first film (Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre), the second Death Scenes has little else in common with its source, and suffers from the absence of its cynically morbid impresario, Anton LaVey. The sequel begins with a thinly disguised advertisement for its predecessor, relayed over some alluring footage from the original movie:

     In our previous presentation, noted author and former crime scene photographer Anton LaVey provided
     a thoroughly fascinating tour of a massive personal scrapbook compiled long ago, by a Los Angeles
     homicide detective, that chronicled a seemingly endless array of startling photographs, and offered a
     rare and insightful view of big city crime. There was even a side-trip down the bloody back streets of
     glamorous Hollywood, where stardom, and even mere dreams of stardom, came at quite a price. Also
     examined were the trigger-happy bootleggers, who made the twenties roar, as well as infamous
     depression-era bank-robbers, whose bullet-riddled corpses were routinely displayed like trophies to the
     eager press. But what of the restless decades that followed? The countless haunting images from both
     the television and video age in this production are intended to further examine the compelling elements
     of cruel fate, and malicious mayhem, and, in the process, perhaps gain a new understanding of the
     often bloody events which have shaped our world over the last half-century.



            We have been warned. The main difference between Death Scenes and Death Scenes 2 is that the sequel utilizes far fewer stills and much more action footage, on both film and videotape, with an appropriately dour voiceover credited to one Harold Wells. The effect of using videotaped footage mixed with black-and-white stills is to make the film appear rather more voyeuristic than its predecessor, more gratuitously violent and explicit, and less of a studied essay on the inevitability of death. But this is not necessarily to say that it is any less of a fierce and powerful film.
         The sequel proper opens with stock sequences of graphic images from World War II. U.S. troops proudly setting off to war are juxtaposed with charred corpses on the battlefield and stills taken from Ernst Friedrich’s anti-war museum’s gallery of grotesque images of war casualties and amputees. Standard war footage is intercut with shots of fields strewn with bodies, the remains of prisoners in concentration camps, and weeping women cradling the bodies of dead children. Further bodies are piled into a mass grave buzzing with flies, stacks of mutilated cadavers are tossed into death pits, and airplanes crash to the ground, all to the accompaniment of appropriately heavy organ chords in a minor key (“additional music” is attributed to George Montalba).
 An inter-title reads “Three cheers for war-noble and beautiful above all!” Mussolini addresses crowds of followers, then is pictured strung up on piano wire in execution. Goebbels speaks to all Germany, then is shown as a corpse. The body of Hitler is pictured in the bunker. The next section returns to the U.S. and shows footage of mobsters and mafia killings after the prohibition era, the executions of rival gang lords, the smuggling and selling of illegal narcotics, and the deaths of various syndicate readers. The film then cuts to moving footage and mortuary stills of recent drug-related homicides and gangland killings in the U.S., as well as in the underdeveloped supply countries.
         The next section of the film is set in the 1950s. Footage of suburban teenagers dancing to rock and roll is intercut with further footage of race riots and violence and some of the “unforgettable atrocities” perpetrated by and upon the U.S. troops in Korea. Korean soldiers are beaten to death with clubs, shot, burned to death, or executed by firing squad, then piled into huge mass graves. Terrorists and radicals abroad are faced with public execution. The film then moves on to show edited highlights from a series of drivers’ education films made in 1955 and shown in U.S. high schools in an attempt to stop speeding from being considered glamorous. This series of films, with titles like Signal 30, Red Pavement and Highways of Blood catalogue the grisly aftermath of actual car crashes, including trains that have crashed into cars at railway crossings and the victims of reckless driving and speeding. The original voiceover does the honors: “we are cold, cruel and harsh, you say. You shouldn’t be allowed to see or hear this. But how else could we give you a better lesson on care? See for yourself how sordid and sickening death can be, and see for yourself the weapon in this case-the steering column.”
         The 1960s brings us a whole series of assassination footage, including the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Robert Kennedy, the despised Caribbean dictator Trujillo, Malcolm X, Ché Guevara, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Footage of race riots and the Kent State University killings leads to a series of stills from Vietnam are massacred, drowned, or executed. A helicopter carries a huge net full of corpses. “Yesterday they were living, breathing bodies,” the voiceover reminds us. “Today, they are just a sanitation problem.” But “even the parade of ghastly images from the battlefields of Vietnam would not brace Americans for the deadly and ever-growing phenomenon in their midst,” the somber commentator remarks. “Some of the nation’s most grisly and senseless incidents of mass murder would occur during the 1960s.” Court footage of the “Boston Strangler” Albert de Salvo and mass murderer Richard Speck follows, accompanied by stills of their victims. This section also included the much-vaunted footage of both the Tate and the LaBianca crime scenes, close-ups of each victim’s death certificate, and stills of their bodies both at the crime scene and in the morgue, all to the accompaniment of Montalba’s loud, dramatic piano chords and a jittery violin.
         The proceeding section deals with the deaths of the “Hollywood greats,” using stills from life shown next to stills of corpses at the morgue or-occasionally-at the scene of death. Included in this sequence are shots of Rudolph Valentino, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Ernie Kovacs, Lenny Bruce, Sal Mineo, Bela Lugosi, Tyrone Power, Grace Kelly, and Natalie Wood. This is followed by lengthy footage of the death of stuntman Vic Morrow and two extras on the set of John Landis’s section of the movie version of The Twilight Zone. Morrow, the voiceover reminds us, was “killed in a freak accident-one that was captured by a host of horrified cameramen.” The rather undramatic footage of the accident is then shown at least six times in succession, from a variety of different angles, in slow motion, and even in a frame-by-frame sequence, accompanied by a series of melancholy piano chords and a horror film-style drum-beat. This section is rounded off with a city coroner’s photograph of bodies at the scenes of their death and in the morgue, including some of the victims of serial killer Jeffery Dahmer.
        A brief excursion into the world of Mexican crime magazines follows. “In Mexico,” we are told, “at any corner news stand, one can find an array of colorful crime scene journals, which feature graphic and uncensored photos”-many of which are then shown, in the form of color stills-“depicting every imaginable form of mayhem.” These stills are set to the compulsively repetitive calliope music from Death Scenes, intercut with bizarre headlines such as “Macabro!” This section then cuts to recognizably contemporary scenes of soccer violence at the Heysel Stadium in Belgium, and fatal scenes of overcrowding from Hillsborough. “In the past several decades,” we are reminded,
 
    advances in video technology have revolutionized the coverage of world events. The placing of live
    mobile cameras in the most troubled and remote corners of the globe has brought a new sense of
    immediacy to the reporting of breaking news. Modern-day disasters, war atrocities, and other tragic
    events are often broadcast as they happen, giving viewers a privileged glimpse of history in the making.
    We now end our chronicle with a random sampling of this era’s most compelling and unforgettable
    images-an everlasting testament to the eternal power of fate and the continuing folly of man.


        These “compelling and unforgettable” images include a rodeo rider being dragged around the ring, then crushed to death under the hooves of his horse; a racing car crashing and the burning body being tossed on to the track; lynchings, hangings, clubbings, and executions in South Africa; and-to the accompaniment of more of Montalba’s slow and melancholy organ chords-more bodies leaping to their deaths from a burning building, and a CCTV recording of a mugging and murder in a convenience store.
 Finally, we are shown the live, on-camera suicide of disgraced Pennsylvania State treasurer R. Budd Dwyer, who was facing an indictment on charges of corruption. Dwyer stands as though about to give a speech, removes a small pistol from an envelope, shoots himself neatly through the mouth, and slumps to the ground, blood streaming from his nose, as his colleague tries to calm the frenzied press reporters and cameramen (“all right, settle down, don’t panic, please, someone call an ambulance and a doctor and the police … don’t panic please, dear god in heaven”). The film concludes with shots of bodies being piled into an anonymous mass grave, intercut with the birth of a stillborn child’s decapitated head and the morbid button logo-in red letters-“we shall overkill.”
         Where Death Scenes, with its relentless parade of black-and-white stills, gives the impression of a thoughtful meditation on the unquestionable potency of death, Death Scenes 2, with its mixture of still and moving footage, appears far more graphic, more detailed, more contemporary, and-in certain places, at least-more shocking. In sequences of film or video footage, the awkwardly shaky hand-held camera, uneven soundtrack, and often vague picture quality all serve to increase (rather than detract from) the impact of the scenes. Whereas Death Scenes catalogues the physical collapse of the human body in death, its sequel proclaims the indignity of the death process, with its unholy cortege of bodies falling, staggering, keeling over, struggling to escape.
 This is death as it happens, death in-your-face, as bodies twist and turn, crack and bleed, bend and fall. Almost as shocking and riveting as the deaths themselves are the observers’ reactions to them, from the valiant rescue attempts at the Hillsborough stadium, to the chaos and abandon accompanying Dwyer’s on-screen suicide, and the defeated gesture of a member of a crowd that has gathered to watch bodies hurling themselves from a burning building like so many rag dolls, who simply turns away, hiding his head in his arms in a gesture of utter despair.
         While lacking the deliberate artistic consciousness in the arrangement and composition of its original’s garish tableaux, Death Scenes 2 contains some contemplative and often ironic collations of images and frames. Publicity shots of laughing, pouting movie stars are intercut with shots of those same faces, pale and swollen, so bloated as to be almost unrecognizable, lying on slabs in the morgue. Underworld victims of gangland killings of the 1940s and 1950s are unexpectedly connected to their contemporary equivalents: striking color shots of street murders, drug-related homicides, and desperate narcotic deals gone violently awry.
 In the case of the Tate-LaBianca killings, the prosaic one-dimensionality of the victims’ death certificates stand in stark, pale contrast to the bodies themselves, hideously bloodied and littered with countless stab wounds, especially the heavily pregnant Sharon Tate, whose swollen and discolored torso is grotesquely bedecked with a thick hangman’s noose. In another tableau, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca lie unclothed and undignified on their bedroom floor, a knife and fork sticking out of Leno LaBianca’s chest, and undecipherable words carved into his torso with the thin blade of a kitchen knife.
          Two components that are significantly less successful in Death Scenes 2 than in its original are the soundtrack and the voiceover. The rattling calliope music of Death Scenes, though initially sounding highly inappropriate (Kerekes and Slater describe it as “kitschy … often more suited to a fairground carnival than a catalogue of death”, 1993, 207), in fact works as a deliberately unsettling counterpoint to the images as they unfold, transforming the film’s litany of corpses into a ghastly circus parade. Montalba’s additional music to Death Scenes 2 creates a far more mundane effect, although the sober piano and nervous violin are perhaps more appropriate to its dual sequences of black-and-white stills intercut with fast-moving video footage.
 In addition, LaVey’s baroque narrative monologues, spelling out in austere and somber tones the method and manner of death in each case, is quite unmatched by Wells’s voiceover to Death Scenes 2, wherein attempts to imitate LaVey’s forbidding tone and fustian recital simply don’t add up. Wells claims that the sequel’s archive materials will usher the “brave and curious” into “a spellbinding trip through the reality that is our world today.” Spellbinding it may be, but, whereas the sepia-tinted black-and-white stills of the original are distanced enough from the present day to inspire an almost sublime feeling of fascination and awe, the “on-screen” crimes and atrocities of Death Scenes 2 place this film squarely in the realms of honest and morbid gore.

                    *    *    *    *

      Directed by Conan Le Cilaire in 1978, Faces of Death-like Death Scenes-launched a whole series of mondo sequels, of which only the first two are of any real interest. Faces of Death 2 in 1981 and Faces of Death 3 in 1985 are interesting only for their inclusion of fabricated, pseudo-“authentic” footage alongside shots of cadavers piled in the morgue, animal mutilation, auto wrecks, train crashes, and so on. Presented by bogus pathologist “Dr. Francis B. Gröss (played by Michael Carr), Faces of Death purports to be an investigative journey around the world to seek out new perspectives on the “various faces of death” collected by the pathologist over the last twenty years.
          The original Faces of Death consists of two distinctly different types of footage: “genuine out-takes from news reports, other mondo films, nature documentaries, sports coverage, and war scenes, alongside faked, pseudo-“authentic” footage purported to be taken by local news stations, close-circuit television networks, and amateur camcorder enthusiasts. This kind of patented footage is also used in most of the sequels to Faces of Death and other mondo imitators, such as Savage Zone (1985), whose images consist mainly of unconvincing and unremarkable sequences of fabricated “incidents.”
            What is especially fascinating about Faces of Death is the way in which the genuine and “hoax” sequences play off one another to negotiate their own “authenticity.” Genuine footage is usually undramatic, unsensational, and diverse in nature. The film begins, for example, with segments of still footage from the catacombs of Guanajuana in Mexico, where “the dead were mummified due to the rich minerals in the earth.” Off-key piano chords and neon son et lumière lighting illuminate the twisted, preserved cadavers of men, women and children-“their faces frozen with a final vision.” Staying in Mexico, we are next shown footage of “the most brutal sport of all,” in which two pit bull terriers tear one another to death to the accompaniment of inapposite piano music.
 From Mexico, we are taken to the Amazon jungle, where “death becomes a mandate of survival” and “there is no shelter for the weak.” Dull nature documentary footage of spiders and insects is followed by a rather undramatic piranha attack on a swimming snake, set to Mexican dance music, where the snake skeleton left floating on the water blatantly contradicts Gröss’s remark that “death occurs in a matter of seconds, and nothing is wasted.” Elsewhere in the Amazon, “Jivaro savages” deep within the river basin use a blow-pipe to kill a monkey and roast it over a fire before dancing around the head of an enemy warrior. From Africa, stock footage includes shots of Masai warriors killing a cow, drinking its blood, then chewing on the raw bones.
         Further authentic footage comes from the slaughterhouse, where a chicken is decapitated with an ax “to the tune of “Old Macdonald had a farm”), and sheep and cow carcasses are bled to death, carved up and skinned to inappropriately lighthearted music (“as consumers, we’re spared the process and only deal with the finished product,” remarks Gröss, cynically). Later scenes of intensive seal-culling focus on the skinned, bleating pups, while Gröss describes how “the island is transformed into a battle-ground of naked carcasses” (and vows “never to wear the skin of an animal” on his back again). We are next taken to a chief coroner’s office and introduced to bodies piled up on trolleys in the corridor, faces split open and skinned, brains removed and weighed, corpses embalmed with injections of preservatory fluid and lying in piles in the refrigeration room (all this overcut with syrupy classical music and Gröss’s ruminations on the possibility of his own violent death). Further on in the film, we are taken to a cryonics clinic to witness bodies being frozen in capsules filled with liquid nitrogen.
        A meeting of the “Children of God” gives us footage of cultists bouncing, shaking, nodding, speaking in tongues and snake-handling. A suicide, “Mary Alice Brighton,” leaps to her death from a building to the accompaniment of an insensitive musical introduction (“a-one, a-two, a-one two three four”). Drowned, bloated bodies are pulled up on to a beach to lively dance music (“I find this kind of death particularly tragic,” remarks our host, “that caused by sheer stupidity”). Volcanos erupt, earthquakes split the land, a flood hits Pennsylvania, and a tornado strikes Mississippi, all to the accompaniment of jaunty tunes. People drop thirty-five stories to their death from a burning building, rubbish piles up on the beach, and animals lie squashed by the roadside. Stock World War II footage follows-of missiles exploding, Hitler rallying his troops, and the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. “I personally don’t know if this situation could repeat itself,” ruminates the meditative Dr. Gröss, “but if it does, we all deserve a life in hell.”
        The section on disease brings us nature documentary-style footage of rats and vampire bats, followed by news footage of people dying from a cholera epidemic in India and famine and malnutrition in Biafra, followed by an operation on a cancerous dog. Finally, the accidents section, including the most graphic sequences of authentic footage, begins with the image of a skydiver whose parachute fails to open and who crashes to his death at eighty miles an hour. The camera lingers over the debris of a train derailment, closing in through the twisted metal in its quest for pieces of mangled bodies. A woman cyclist is crushed under a truck, and after her body has been removed, bloody detritus is scraped off the road and scooped into a plastic bag. A small plane crashes when its amateur pilot attempts a few stunts: “arms and legs are strewn throughout the wreckage,” and the bodies are lifted from the cockpit and put straight into a hearse.
Finally, we are shown what happened when a commercial 747 collided with a light plane over a residential section of San Diego. As the camera seeks out the remains of bodies “mutilated beyond recognition”-feet, hands, amputated limbs, and decapitated heads strewn in every imaginable are throughout the neighborhood-Gröss describes how the “stench of death” led the place to become “a virtual morgue.” At last, Gröss enthuses, he has stumbled across “the most gruesome face of death.”
       Significantly, these diverse illustrations of  “death … in all its faces” are liberally intercut with sections of fabricated, pseudo-“genuine” sequences. These sections draw for their impact on their “appropriation” of the accidents of fate, witness response, amateur camerawork, and paroxysmal soundtracks well known to any audience accustomed to watching news out-takes, “reality” programming, lurid “case studies,” and ratings-winning, on-air ambulance chasers, all a staple of contemporary tabloid verité. The difference between the real and the faked footage is always quite clear, at least to any regular viewer of such films; in fact, the impact of the faked footage is its underscoring of the fact that everything else we see, however blurred or ambiguous, is unquestionably real. 
Some of these faked sequences are just clumsily played out, such as the “restaurant scene” in which an implausible group of “tourists” tuck into the brains of a “live” monkey, brought squealing to the table in a special trap. Others, such as the embarrassingly ludicrous “true life” footage of an “alligator attack,” use standard amateuresque techniques to validate the sequence with the official stamp of “authenticity”-namely, various panicking “patrol officials,” shouting crowds, children’s faces being turned away from the scene, a blanket being thrown roughly over the “body”, a shaky hand-held camera (with the designation “New’s Watch”), and the final, familiar hand-over-the-lens routine leading to an abrupt blackout.
      More professional “amateur” sequences are quite clearly based on well-known pieces of film footage. The “assassination” of a heavily-bearded “Islamic fanatic” is a fictionalized composite of two real-life sequences. It contains resonances of R. Budd Dwyer’s infamous on-camera suicide featured in Death Scenes 2-a speaker almost identical to Dwyer introduces the “fanatic,” in French-mixed with the Robert Kennedy assassination footage, another staple of mondo footage, generally followed up with clips from an interview with Sirhan Sirhan, as in The Killing of America. Here, the “assassination” is followed up by an interview with assassin “François Journdan,” wearing a balaclava helmet and displaying his personal assortment of handguns, his voice “disguised” through a process of sound distortion.
This is followed by fabricated footage of “Mike Lawrence,” a serial killer run amok, clearly based on the shootout between Charles Whitman and the Texas police featured in The Killing of America. This, too, has all the hallmarks of spurious “authenticity”: women’s screams, police sirens in the background, the sound of random shots being fired, breaking glass, passing traffic, police radio static tuning in and out, shaky hand-held camera footage, and the bloodied bodies of Lawrence’s “family” strewn around the kitchen floor, followed by the now over-familiar “and-over-the-lens” shock verité finale.
         Two later sequences seem to be based on the self-immolation of Quang Duc protesting the pro-Catholic Saigon government’s unjust treatment of Buddhists, which is featured spectacularly midway through Jacopetti and Prosperi’s Mondo Cane 2. The first is footage supposedly “shot by a Canadian tourist in the Middle East” of an execution by scimitar, in which the “victim’s” trunk, separated from his head, fails even to bleed; the second is a man allegedly setting himself alight in protest against the construction of a nuclear energy plant.
 Ironically, as Kerekes and Slater have discovered (1994, 168-70), the immolation of Quang Duc in Mondo Cane 2 is itself an elaborate reconstruction of an actual event, so what Faces of Death presents us with is, in fact, the paradoxical phenomenon of professional footage passing itself off as amateur by imitating other professional footage that passes itself off as amateur-as though the pseudo-verité had become a genre in its own right, with its own particular set of aesthetic codes and conventions. Faces of Death also involves a pseudo “stunt car accident” based on any of a number of real stunt tragedies accidentally caught on camera; but this particular example stands as an ironic harbinger. In this case, the crashing car, panicking films crew, and “death on impact” bear an uncanny resemblance to the on-camera death of Vic Morrow on the set of The Twilight Zone ten years later, replayed at length in Death Scenes 2.
        In order to allow humankind to “stop and question the whole meaning of justice,” Gröss generously decides to let us witness the “genuine” execution of the theatrically nervous “Larry da Silva”-named, presumably, in the hope that the sound of his name might revive some half-forgotten memory of the name of the Boston Strangler, Albert da Salvo. The soundtrack becomes indecorously buoyant and light-hearted as two men in black come to fetch “da Silva” from his cell and walk him down the aisle towards the electric chair. His eyes are taped shut, a helmet is fastened on his head, and his body is strapped in the chair in anticipation of the electric charges that will jolt theatrically through his drooling body. A doctor enters the cell with a stethoscope and shakes his head in an exaggerated way, leading to further electric jolts until streams of fake blood pour from his eyes and down his face. “A strange smell, like almond blossoms, permeated the witness room,” claims Gröss gleefully.
         A similar sequence, exploring “the world of cults,” seems to base its “credibility” on the fact that the “cult leader” bears a notable similarity to Charles Manson. “As he explained his beliefs and methods,” claims Gröss, “I realized I was dealing with a maniac.” The cult, supposedly from San Francisco, apparently believe that “the power to everlasting life is held in the internal organs of the dead”-a pretext for all kinds of “cultic activities” to be enacted on a “dead body,” which is carved open with a knife, the internal organs removed and eaten raw. “The ritual ceremony culminated in an orgy,” adds Gröss, lasciviously, but we can only assume that he made his excuses and left, as-predictable-the by-now tedious “hand placed over the camera lens” routine prevents any further filming of the imminent Satanic debacle.
     Another fabricated sequence, toward the end of the film, is based rather closely on the accidentally captured authentic footage of a tourist in a national park being eaten alive by a feeding lioness, which is featured in a number of mondo movies including Antonio Climati and Mario Morra’s Savage Man … Savage Beast (1975). Kerekes and Slater describe the original sequence in its entirety:
 
       The event is recorded on Super-8 film by other tourists filming from adjacent vehicles. Dernitsch
       leaves the car from where his wife and children observe. He approaches the solitary lioness unaware
       of the proximity of a second animal. The shots volley between scenes of Dernitsch struggling and
       bloody beneath the animals, and the reactions of his family in their car. The most troubling shot is
       that of the lions tearing at unrecognizable pink meat, while above their bobbing heads protrudes
       Dernitsch’s leg; trousers and socks still in place but minus his shoe. When the park ranger arrives
       all that remains of the unfortunate sightseer is placed in a plastic bag. His camera is retrieved and
       the few seconds of unimpressive footage that cost him his life are shown. (Kerekes and Slater 1993,
       180-81).


          The sequence in Faces of Death based on the Dernitsch footage is set amid generic mountain scenery. Allegedly recorded-exactly like the Dernitsch footage-by two separate sets of tourists with Super-8 cine cameras filming from adjacent vehicles, the tourist, “Bob,” creeps up farcically on a large grizzly bear, which takes very little time to turn, attack, and eat him alive. The final shot of the Dernitsch footage shows a lioness with the dead man’s camera in its mouth; in the Faces of Death sequence, the bear is seen ambling away into the woods with a rubbery-looking “severed limb” hanging from its jaws. Incidentally, the conspicuously fabricated “alligator attack” in an earlier sequence of Faces of Death appropriates a similar image: it concludes with a shot of the game warden’s battered hat lying on the back of the river.
    “It’s violent … but only as death is finally violent,” boasts the original publicity slogan for Faces of Death. Actually, there is no violent death recorded in Faces of Death-no authentic violent death, at any rate, apart from that of animals. Nonetheless, what is interesting about this film-and this is something that also recurs in each of its sequels, and in all mondo films of this style-is the way in which it appropriates the images, soundtrack and mise-en-scènes of existing “live” death footage, even down to the most trivial “authenticating” detail, and sets them up as “classics” of accidentally captured amateur of home video footage. Certain filmic tropes, images, and incidental details have henceforth come to represent semiotic designations of “authenticity” in all subsequently prefabricated “live” film footage, from the initially out-of-focus visuals and shaky hand-held camera, to the predictable final hand-placed-over-the-lens and the well-rehearsed mantra of all self-respecting professional “amateur” video footage, “get that goddamn camera out of here!”
Incidentally, it seems inevitable that repressed material from the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 will appear as part of a mondo movie long before it becomes acceptable viewing on network television. The fact that such footage remains repressed, in fact, virtually guarantees a market for such it. Many mondo movies produced abroad have contrived to play on anti-American sentiments. A Japanese video called The Shocks, for example, released in 1989, consists of unedited news footage of American disasters and opens with the image of a tear of blood running down the face of the Statue of Liberty.
Many commentators have expressed fears that graphic footage taken on September 11 could make its way into the hands of evil individuals who might then exploit it for the sick pleasure of those voyeurs who collect such underground footage, or charge people to watch it on the Internet. There seems to be a widespread sense of anxiety about the fact that this repressed material will make its way to that frightening place known as “out there”-the dark boiler room of western culture-presumably alongside footage of animal torture and pre-pubescent children involved in sexually explicit acts. This belief is itself supported by the assumption that it is the evil people “out there”-pedophiles, psychopaths, snuff movie makers, suicide bombers, Islamic terrorists and other assorted sickos-who are responsible for the horrors that occur on a daily basis in American society.
However exaggerated such fears may be, future mondo films will clearly make much of the “secret” footage of 9/11. There have already been reports of such footage being shown on video in the Middle East and China. Apparently, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, workers at Beijing television worked round-the-clock to produce a documentary they called Attack America, which splices scenes from Hollywood films with shots of the events of September 11th. As rescue workers pick through the rubble of the twin towers, according to journalist Damien McElroy, “the commentator proclaims that the city has reaped the consequence of decades of American bullying of weaker nations” (10).
   
            *    *    *    *

         There are, of course, a number of moral issues at stake here. Its voyeuristic presentation of violent and real human deaths has meant that mondo is a long way from being as “respectable” as the traditional horror film, and is generally anathematized critics, academics, and cultural commentators alike. The exhibition of violent death for public diversion is nothing new, as any glance at the history of popular entertainment will reveal-from Roman games and “satyr plays” to crucifixion, torture and public execution. However, recent developments in the visual media, by allowing us a permanent public testament to all kinds of private tragedies, have placed the issue in an entirely different kind of arena. The revolution in video recording and home VCR players now allows the spectator to witness death in private, again and again, at different speeds, and from a variety of angles, exactly as it happened “in the flesh.” Mondo is usually considered offensive because it essentially makes the violent death of the human body into a leisure pursuit.
     Anton LaVey claims, in his self-penned soundtrack to Death Scenes, that our fascination with vivid and graphic images of violent bodily collapse lies in our unconscious understanding of how such representations can remind us of the universal inevitability of death and thereby invite us to live our lives more fully, to contemplate “life with honor, death with dignity.” This is either simplifying the case or overstating it, but there is an argument to be made that the frisson of horror evoked by a road accident or a local murder is a sensation that is, essentially, both existential and life-affirming.
        Users and critics of pornography have amply testified how the simulated erotica of soft-core porn is commonly more effective, more arousing, and certainly more cinematically visual than hard core’s representation of human bodies engaged in “actual” sexual intercourse. If Jean Baudrillard, in Simulations (1983), is right that the boundaries between the “real” and the simulacrum have become so blurred that the simulacrum has, in many cases, taken the place of the “real,” then why is it that this particular area of “reality cinema”-the footage of  “real,” on-screen death-should somehow retain its power to shock in an arena so full of graphic and challenging fictional competitors?
The answer is twofold, and underlines the most important distinctions between the mondo movie and mainstream horror. Firstly, as André Bazin (1971) has argued, the unique power of the photographic image lies in its ability to present the actual object itself, freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. Linda Williams has pointed out that this is the essence of hard-core pornography: the decontextualization and deracination of the moment of orgasm, a moment temporarily echoing the safety and security of the womb in its-albeit transitory-lack of subjectivity (Williams, 1989, 100-101).  It is this same drive towards the unity of oblivion that fuels the momentum of mondo. If, as Georges Bataille argued in 1927, life signifies discontinuity and separateness and death signifies continuity and nondifferentiation (Bataille 1985, 160), then the desire for and attraction of death suggests also a desire to return to the state of original oneness with the mother.
         The “real” annihilation of the “other” in mondo signifies a kind of fleeting fulfillment: a return to the self as a coherent and unitary entity, always imagined but impossible to achieve. Unlike traditional horror, mondo is dedicated to capturing the visual evidence of the mechanical truth of bodily disintegration caught in involuntary spasm, the ultimate and uncontrollable confession of bodily collapse at the moment of death: a possibility imagined much earlier by Bazin in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1971). Because desire cannot exist without lack, the only possible end of desire would ultimately be the annihilation of the “other”: that is, the graphic portrayal of on-screen death. In this sense, mondo gives rise to both a yearning for and a terror of self-disintegration, signifying the obliteration of the self of the protagonist of the film, as well as that of the observing spectator, a fact that has important cultural consequences for the positioning of the audience.
         Secondly, mondo is more conspicuously shocking than other forms of the horror film because-while maintaining many of the qualities of mainstream horror also obsessed with bodily openings (though not “real” ones)-it either allows fictive storyline to merge with “truth,” or else it ignores cohesion of film footage completely, thereby dissolving genre barriers altogether. The most important distinction between the mondo movie and the mainstream horror film is that mondo has virtually no interest in the construction of characters and plots with recognizable psychological, social, and political environments.
     As in the Grand Guignol of the late nineteenth-century French street theater, subtlety, psychology, character, sustained narrativity, and so on are all sacrificed to the shock effect and the prevailing images of bodily disintegration. The mondo film’s repetitious litany of a parade of bodily violence-clips of unknown people in incomprehensible contexts-shares few of the characteristics of any other nonfiction cinema form. In this, mondo is both a “purified” and a “defiled” version of the traditional horror narrative. To use an analogy, mondo stands in relation to the mainstream horror film as the “cum-shot compilation” does to the Hollywood romance. Both are distilled, undiluted collections of those moments that their traditional counterparts cannot reveal.
          At odds in the cultural scheme of things, the mondo film is so much more radical and disturbing than traditional forms of the horror film because it is itself discreditable and contradictory, refusing to fit into any existing cultural category. It falls loosely somewhere between the genres of horror film and documentary, between entertainment and edification, between moralizing diatribe and testament of sexual perversion. Like the fragmented bodies it depicts, in fact, mondo is abject, a casualty of the norms of ontological propriety.










Works Cited
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        University of California Press.
Butler, Ivan. 1967. The Horror Film. New York and London: Zwemmer.
Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Kerekes, David, and David Slater. 1993. Killing for Culture: An Illustrated History of Death Film from
        Mondo to Snuff. London: Creation Books. Reprinted 1996.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1984. “Structure and Form: Reflections of a Work by Vladimir Propp.” In Vladimir
        Propp, Theory and History of Folklore, edited by Anatoly Lieberman, translated by
        Ariadna Y. Martin and Richard P. Martin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McElroy, Damien, “Beijing Markets Film of American Attacks,” News Telegraph (U.K.),
         November 3, 2001, 10.
Prince, Stephen. 1988. “Dread, Taboo and the Thing: Towards a Social History of the Horror Film.”
        Wide Angle 10, no. 3: 19-29.
Williams, Linda. 1989. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible.” Berkeley and Los
             Angeles: University of California Press.
 Wood, Robin. 1978. “The Return of the Repressed.” Film Comment 14: 25-32.
-----     1979. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” American Nightmare: Essays on the
               Horror Film, edited by Andrew Britton, et al. Toronto: Festival of Festivals.
       Reprinted, Movies and Methods, vol. 2, edited by Bill Nichols. Berkeley and Los
       Angeles: University of California Press, 1989.
Zillman, Dolf, 1998, “The Psychology of the Appeal of Portrayals of Violence,” in Jeffrey H. Goldstein,
           ed., Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent Entertainment, Oxford University Press,
           New York: Oxford.