Snuff films

Snuff films are presented in 2666 as a contested idea at the intersection of Santa Teresa’s femicides, criminal reporting, and the market for sensational images. The novel neither confirms that a local industry exists nor treats the rumors as harmless: it shows how claims of recorded murder circulate alongside real killings, while the evidence offered for them remains uncertain, mediated, and sometimes deliberately fabricated.

Rumor in a city of killings

At the beginning of the European critics’ stay in Santa Teresa, a young local man tells Jean-Claude Pelletier and Manuel Espinoza that more than two hundred women have been killed. He estimates that the deaths extend from 1993 or 1994 to the present and suggests that the true total may be higher, perhaps two hundred and fifty or three hundred. Espinoza recalls the conversation the next morning, when Pelletier has the local papers and a Spanish-French dictionary on the hotel terrace. The reported scale of the killings is initially difficult for the visitors to absorb, but the passage makes clear that disbelief does not diminish the underlying fact: many women are dead.

The city surrounding those reports is expanding rapidly. Its geography runs from scrap-built settlements and neglected streets through wealthier neighborhoods to abandoned industrial sites, rail lines, garbage-filled gullies, and the maquiladora horizon. At its northern edge, a fence marks the border with the United States; industrial parks are themselves ringed by poorer neighborhoods. The landscape does not prove the existence of a snuff-film trade, but it supplies the material setting in which violence, industrial growth, poverty, and border movement coexist. The rumor gains force within a city whose scale and uneven development make both the killings and the search for explanations difficult to contain.

Reporting, denial, and the contest over evidence

The claim becomes explicit in late 1996, when Mexican media report or hint that films of real murders are being made in northern Mexico and that Santa Teresa is the capital of the supposed trade. In a conversation with two reporters, former Mexico City police chief General Humberto Paredes says he has witnessed many terrible things but has never seen such films and is unsure they exist. The old crime reporter Macario Lopez Santos insists that they do; the general allows that they may exist while emphasizing that he never encountered one despite having seen and been informed of everything during his career. Neither the dinner conversation nor the reporters’ claims settle the question.

Macario frames the alleged industry as a symptom of the surrounding conditions, not an explanation that can account for them by itself. He points to corruption, the drug trade, and the money moving through it, while the general resists the suggestion that contemporary corruption is unprecedented and argues that money and pornography existed before drug lords without producing the alleged films. Their disagreement sets two kinds of evidence against each other: a reporter’s account of a changed criminal environment and a former official’s claim to comprehensive experience. The general’s confidence does not resolve the uncertainty; instead, the gap between what institutions say they have seen and what reporters suspect remains part of the story.

A separate report supplies the notion with a longer, transnational media history. A correspondent from Buenos Aires, visiting Santa Teresa, consults a local newspaper’s files on disappeared, kidnapped, and murdered women. Through a chain of acquaintances, he meets a man who claims to have seen a snuff film. The correspondent agrees to watch it out of professional interest and curiosity, but refuses to pay for it and asks only for a copy afterward. His account then moves beyond the alleged local film to the history he associates with the term, shifting attention from the question of whether a particular Santa Teresa crime was filmed to the broader circulation of stories about such films.

The embedded history of Snuff

The correspondent’s account reaches back to 1972, when American filmmakers Mike and Clarissa Epstein arrive in Argentina with a crew that includes cameraman JT Hardy. The project’s setting and the filmmakers’ language evoke a sensational fantasy of the Argentine countryside as a place of danger and spectacle. Hardy, however, becomes absorbed in the ranch owner, Estela. His private longing contrasts with his formal courtesy toward her: he does not make suggestive advances, and when she offers to drive the filmmakers back to Buenos Aires, he chooses to travel with the team. The film’s production is thus recounted beside an unfulfilled romance, not as a verified record of an actual murder.

After filming, rumors spread that a young actress had died during production and that Epstein and the crew had killed her to capture a real death. The story is explicitly treated as rumor, and the account says that no one took it seriously at the time. Epstein nevertheless helps spread it, and versions of the claim reach cinephile circles in the United States. When Snuff opens in Los Angeles and New York the following year, it fails commercially. A television commentator examines it frame by frame and demonstrates that the purported real crime was faked. The embedded history therefore distinguishes a fabricated claim of documentary murder from the actual murder the genre’s name implies.

The story does not end with that debunking. Epstein tries to exploit the film’s gruesome reputation, while his later career and death are related as further fragments of the account. Clarissa remains in Buenos Aires, later returns to the United States during Argentina’s military dictatorship, and Epstein is eventually killed in a fall while making his last film. These details enlarge the historical frame around the production, but they do not authenticate the alleged murder in Snuff. The decisive evidence about the film itself remains the commentator’s demonstration that the supposed crime was staged.

The image and the violence it cannot explain

In Santa Teresa, the snuff-film claim competes with a record of actual femicides. The novel describes the early identification and examination of Esperanza Gomez Saldana, a thirteen-year-old whose death is entered into the count in January 1993. Police and judicial officials examine the case; a medical examiner performs an autopsy, and the body is placed in a hospital freezer. The procedure yields facts about a named victim, but the wider account cautions that earlier deaths may have gone uncounted or undiscovered. Against that documented institutional sequence, rumors of filmed murder offer a sensational image that cannot substitute for the harder work of identifying victims or establishing responsibility.

The public attention paid to the killings is itself unstable. Chucho Flores tells Oscar Fate that whenever the numbers rise, the murders return to the news and people talk, but the story eventually melts away and everyone goes back to work. He calls the killings a brutal strike, then describes a city crowded with factories, maquiladoras, migrants, a cocaine cartel, money, poverty, and infrastructure unable to keep pace with demographic growth. The missing resource, in his view, is time. His account helps explain why an extraordinary media label might briefly concentrate attention while leaving the underlying violence and its conditions unresolved.

That cycle also shapes what can be reported. Fate pitches a story about the killings, the possibility that one or two people are responsible for an unprecedented series of murders, drug trafficking, the border, police corruption, and the city’s growth. His editor rejects the proposal and directs him to finish his boxing assignment and return to New York. In another exchange, Fate is told that the magazine has no interest in his story or no budget. The reporting frame is therefore constrained not only by uncertain evidence but by editorial priorities and resources: the femicides may be locally known and repeatedly discussed while remaining difficult to make visible to a distant readership.

What the rumors expose

The snuff-film motif draws together several competing forms of visibility. A film promises an image that can be watched and circulated; a crime reporter seeks a story that can be verified and published; police and medical officials produce records; and the victims remain vulnerable to omission even within the record of deaths. The novel repeatedly withholds a simple resolution about the alleged Santa Teresa industry. In January 1996, while imprisoned, Klaus Haas asks how murders can continue if he is the killer and points to a distinctive similarity between knots in two victims’ bindings. His press conference challenges the sufficiency of the official case against him, but it does not establish that killings were filmed or identify a film industry.

By placing the debunked Snuff beside the unconfirmed Santa Teresa rumors and the documented killings, the narrative makes sensational representation part of the problem rather than a solution. The fabricated film can turn the claim of real murder into commercial spectacle; the rumor can magnify attention without settling what happened; and the repeated rise and fall of news coverage can leave the victims’ deaths politically unattended. The concept matters less as a confirmed criminal enterprise than as a measure of how violence is mediated: what can be shown, what can be proved, what attracts an audience, and what continues outside the frame.