Forbidden Footage

To celebrate the premiere of Les chambres rouges, one of the major sensations of the SOFC at Sitges2023, we revisit the article published in the Festival Diary of the 56th edition, where, inspired by Pascal Plante's work, we reflected on those images we know we shouldn't watch.

A review, inspired by Les chambres rouges, of the depictions of the snuff industry in cinema over the past decades – by Andreu Marves

Since its genesis in the 1970s and its popularization with the advent of the Internet, snuff videos have been a constant presence in the crime and horror genres over the past decades. The gruesomeness of the phenomenon and its uncertain factuality (urban legend or reality?) make it a perfect bait to lure morbid audiences; hence, certain extreme narratives use snuff as a framework to depict explicit violence. However, other works approach the subject with a critical perspective, avoiding sensationalism and questioning (and making us question) the conditions that would make such a crime possible: there are many serial killers, but what sets snuff apart is the presumed existence of an audience that enjoys watching such an abject spectacle. For this reason, its inclusion in fiction confronts us with our own role as recipients of all kinds of negative emotions through art. The question posed, as terrible as it is unavoidable, is particularly relevant for horror fans: is it possible that our desire for intolerable images outweighs our repulsion toward them?

Alejandro Amenábar already approached snuff through the lens of the thriller in Tesis, placing Ana Torrent at the center of the narrative—a choice that, given her status as “the eyes of Spanish cinema,” made her an ideal surrogate for the audience. Her character’s ambivalent feelings toward the serial killer played by Eduardo Noriega reflect our own mix of fascination and repulsion toward not just snuff, but also tabloid journalism. This idea is perfectly encapsulated in the terrifying tracking shot that closes Tesis, where we see hospital patients on edge, awaiting the imminent televised broadcast of a murder recording. Nick Drnaso delves into the reasons behind this attraction in his unparalleled graphic novel Sabrina, where the fragmentation of the social fabric and the distrust in authorities serve as fertile ground for the spread of conspiracy theories about the recording of a young woman's murder.

In both cases, as in Les chambres rouges, which was featured in the SOFC section at Sitges, the images themselves are relegated to the off-screen realm of the unrepresentable: we never see the videos attributed to Ludovic Chevalier, the alleged murderer of three teenagers, yet their absence is deafening. The strategy of concealment employed by Canadian director Pascal Plante, evident from his choice of a restrained and dialogue-heavy genre like courtroom drama, leads him to start from an ostensibly external perspective (that of Kelly-Anne, a young woman with an inscrutable face who attends the trial, blending in with Chevalier's followers) and gradually move closer, drawing a demonic spiral toward an unfathomable horror. At a certain point, Les chambres rouges manages to turn a mere exchange of glances into one of the most terrifying images of this edition—one that visually embodies the aphorism, “when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back at you.”