The Daily Mail campaign: Ban the Sadist Videos
HOW THE FILMS ARE MADE AND THE DAMAGE THEY DID TO ONE LITTLE BOY

The men who grow rich on bloodlust
SPECIAL INVESTIGATION BY TIM MILES
DATELINE: NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY

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Bill Lustig: 'For five bucks people get somebody to act out their fantasies... Everybody wants to kill someone.' Sineon Nuchterne: 'In America, success is the thing... no matter how you arrive at it.' Meir Zarchi: 'I don't have any moral responsibility for the effect of films on the audience.' Kaufman: cashing in with decapitated head and butcher's knife.

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INSIDE a secluded woodland cabin a young woman lies sprawled on a couch. Her throat has been ripped out and blood soaks her yellow blouse.

Two men look on hesitantly. 'Jesus,' said Brendan Faulkner, she's supposed to have been gutted, man. The blood's gotta be all over, like it's for real.'

The murder 'victim' sighs. The blood is as sticky as syrup in the 80 degree heat and the latex rubber throat wound Is constricting her breathing.

Faulkner, 30, and his partner, Tom Duran, 31, are working against time on their latest film project, provisionally titled Hells Spawn, to be released next spring. Investors - doctors, lawyers, politicians - want to see a lucrative return on money funnelled into the 'arts' as a legal tax dodge.

The money men never read the script they will probably never see the package... which shows a heart being torn out and a dum-dum bullet blowing away the spine.

Bizarre
'Splatter' films, as they are known in America, are ignored by the establishment... until the annual accounts are filed If the film, the latest in a genre replete with unremitting sadism, makes three times each backer's initial £10,000 stake, they will be content.

Neatly packaged into a video cassette, the 90-minute £100,000 Technicolour blood bath will find an appreciative audience in Britain where horror accounts for over 20 per cent of the rental market.

Until the Government enshrines new laws, the film can circulate without a censor's certificate. Children will be able to watch the same sickening scenes I saw being filmed 30 miles outside New York.

Brendan Faulkner is unrepentant. 'Hell, I threw up my guts when I ran over a squirrel. It was lying there all bloody and real. I get shocked and repelled by real violence. Kids know this stuff is make-believe. Splatter is pure entertainment.

'Shooting a movie is simple. Getting the bread is harder. A lot of people want to dump money for tax reasons. And we owe it to them to get the movie placed so we can secure more money for future projects.'

Americans sated by random violence on their own streets cannot get enough of the fictional type on their TV and cinema screens. The UK has provided a fresh outlet.

The industry has bizarre spin offs. News sheets like Gore Gazette and Sleazoid Express dwell lovingly on the most brutal scenes.

Behind the cheaply printed headlines are the producers and directors whose films have endowed them with a perverse celebrity status - The Godfathers of Gore, Meir Zarchi is one of the new breed.

He was responsible for I Spit On Your Grave, banned in Britain for its sickening plot about revenge exacted by a rape victim on her four attackers. The character, played by a distant relative of the legendary comedian Buster Keaton, hacks, bludgeons and castrates her assailants in a welter f blood.

Mr Zarchi is proud of his work, which cost £200,000 and took five weeks to film.

In his office above New York's Times Square Mr Zarchi, a 46-year-old Israeli immigrant, said: 'I have seen violence since I was three years old. I have seen street fights. I have seen the British shooting terrorists during the mandate in Palestine. Whatever happened to the girl and the four, guys in the film is reality.

Attacks
'Rape is ugly so I made the scene realistically ugly. I Could have toned down the brutality but it would have been just another picture made and forgotten.

'For all my love of England you have still got Victorian attitudes. The authorities were stupid to crack down. The film will only go on to the black market. It has been made a cause célèbre.'

Mr Zarchi becomes more animated when asked about censorship. 'God forbid There should be absolutely no censorship. Once you start you never stop. If somebody wants to pay five bucks to see it in their home they should be allowed to. Are you going to let cops say what you can or can't see?'

Told that I Spit On Your Grave was branded, among other videos, as being responsible for triggering an l8-year-old Middlesex youth, Martin Austin, into two rape attacks, Meir Zarchi, a father of two teenage children, conceded: 'A picture like this one can release hatred, particularly in a disturbed mind.

'Maybe this guy needed a catalyst. He was on a short fuse and maybe he would have done it anyway. Who am I to tell I Am I to be inside this man's complex mind? I don't have any moral responsibility for the effect of films on the audience.'

Simon Nuchterne, like Zarchi, landed in the U.S. as an ambitious 17-year-old. He wears the trappings of success like a well cut suit.

Born in Belgium and now 47, he lives in a spacious apartment in Manhattan with his artist wife Anna.

Nuchterne, slim and grey-haired, was responsible for directing the stomach-turning extracts in Snuff, the notorious film that purports to portray a real sex murder.

In the film, banned but still circulating, the female victim is depicted having her fingers severed with bolt cutters, an arm amputated by power saw and her intestines ripped open.

'The public is the best censor.' he said. 'If they don't like a type of film it will die from lack of support.

'For immature people, it's the duty of parents to protect them. But there is no truth that this kind of film damaged healthy minds. Human beings are being dehumanised by society, not by films. The film simply reflects what is going on.'

Within the industry, he said, he is admired. 'In America success is the thing, no matter bow you arrived at it.'

Equally cynical about his trade is Bill Lustig, 28, bearded and paunchy. Feet up on his office desk he talks about his film Maniac, a shocker, which includes slow motion garrotting and knifing. 'For five bucks people get somebody to act out their fantasies.. Everybody wants to kill someone, and they warms, see the guy blown apart, pushed in front of a train, hurled down an elevator shaft.'

Maniac had grossed, to date, about £8 million, he said. Aimong the inves- tors was a City broking firm 'They are very conservative-they wouldn't like their name mentioned,' said an unusually reticent Mr Lustig. 'They got a significant return, more than three times their money.'

Few horror films cause as much anxiety as Driller Killer. Distributors were prosecuted and filed for dealing in the appalling film, focusing on a crazed artist who murders by boring an electric drill into the skull. Its director, Abel Ferrara, fails to understand the public repulsion. 'Driller Killer was a comedy,' he said. 'TV shows the real violence with news films of a shooting with a camera giving you slow motion replays.'

Carving
Charles Kaufman, a former gag writer for Bob Hope and an ex-porn film director, is candid about his latest film, Mother's Day.

Video viewers can watch how two girls avenge the rape and murder of a friend by slamming an aerial through a man's neck before axing him to death and by driving an electric carving knife into his brother's head.

'It was made to cash in on the horror boom - a purely commercial decision. Primarily it was to make money for the investors and put me on the map as a film director,'

Without exception all the directors pay homage to the man who started the trend-Herschell Gos'don Lewis. In the Sixties and Seventies his films, set new levels of explicit brutality.

Now living in Florida, he is still cutting up half bodies but now the victims are sword fish prized for their succulent steaks.

His cult style of horror adopted only too readily b money hungry acolytes is set to cause the British censor major headaches as the video horror boom continues to thrive.

• In Britain Norman Abbott, head of the British Videogram Association warns that rogue dealers will exploit the boom in sadistic films before Parliament can crack down with tough new laws.

'The situation Is going to get infinitely worse,' he said. 'Those responsible for the worst of the nasties will redouble their efforts.'

'Taken Over' by something evil on the TV set
WHILE evidence is slowly building on how video horror films encourage violence in real life, some doctors are now becoming very concerned about their effect on mental health.

Children under ten are particularly vulnerable to night terrors inspired by these 'nasties' and the distress not only lasts for days, but may trigger phobias in adult life.

Dr John Mathal, senior registrar at Dundee Royal infirmary, has banned his own sons, aged eight and six from seeing any such films. He has also read all the research he can.

Dr Mathal is also appealing for GPs everywhere to tell him of cases brought to them. He was warned of the dangers by a frightening personal experience.

In the calm of his office in the child and family psychiatry clinic, he told me the story of 12-year-old James.

He was weeping and clinging to his mother. He refused to sit down. He was convinced that if he sat on the chair he would fall straight through It. He was frightened someone would touch him because their hands would go through him.

'It was a typical high anxiety state. He heard loud talking In his lead and thought something evil had come out of the television set and taken him over.'

Separated
'James told me he must be possessed. He didn't want to eat, he was frightened to go to sleep, he wouldn't let his mother out of his sight and she couldn't go to work.'

Dr Mathal discovered that James had, in the company of adults, watched a video horror film on television on the day of a family wedding.

'He came from a broken home. He had been separated from his mother on three iccaslons before. Now his brother was leaving, he felt the loss, he felt unhappy.

'He was away from home staying at a friend's house. James said he went off to sleep after the film and the next thing he knew was that he was half awake looking at an awful face, with bulging veins, staring at him.

'He then felt as It something or someone had entered him at this point and he couldn't be rid of them, although he paced the floor to shake them off.'

Dr Mathal began therapy, and after one particular Session James was allowed to leave hospital.

'But on the bus going home he suddenly heard voices, Which he subsequently described as "loud thoughts" and came back. He also described getting a picture of his brother's face which was distorted.'

It was 12 days before James was well enough to return home. He settled down and went back to school, although for weeks afterwards he refused to sleep with the lights out even though he had another brother for company.

It is possible that James's family history of uncertainties might have pre-disposed him to become the victim of an anxiety state. But how do you recognise a child at risk?

Sensitive
Dr Mathal identifies the timid child, the sensitive child, the child who is too young to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Those who are not bold and forthcoming, but a'so those Who are suffering some loss, like the break up of their parents' marriage.

Distress in children lasts up to three days. But the Influence may last a life-time.

'This problem Is just beginning as children, often through their friends, are becoming more exposed to video horror films. Parents should be warned about this. My opinion.-is that no child under ten should be allowed to see such films.

'There is no Information yet on what damage they may do later on In that child's life. But anxiety states can be triggered by events. Or the adult can develop a phobia.'

Children down the ages have been brought up On a diet of ghosties and witches and ghoulish fairy stories. But the doctor says television can cause more nightmares than someone reading a story ever could.

'It is something that really frightens parents. Night terrors, for example, are very different from traditional nightmares. The child appears to be awake but cannot snap out of this frightening fantasy world.'

For everyone's sake, the doctor hopes parents will censor what their children watch. And take particular guard during the school holidays when young friends may Invite them back to their houses... and their video nasties.