David Kerekes

David Slater

An Illustrated History of Death Film (Creation Cinema)

Killing for Culture

With a critical focus on US-Latin American encounters, the book analyses geopolitical issues from a post-colonial perspective. A novel approach to understanding US-Third World relations. Critically considers the genesis of US power. Interweaves ideas and events, interventions and representations. Highlights the contribution of Third World intellectuals.

Rethinking North-South Relations

Geopolitics and the Post-Colonial

A social history of the ‘video nasty’. In the early 1980s, video technology forever changed the face of home entertainment. The videocassette – a handy-sized cartridge of magnetic tape inside a plastic shell – domesticated cinema as families across Britain began to consume films in an entirely new way. Demand was high and the result was a video gold rush, with video rental outlets appearing on every high street almost overnight. Without moderation their shelves filled with all manner of films depicting unbridled sex and violence. A backlash was inevitable. Video was soon perceived as a threat to society, a view neatly summed up in the term ‘video nasties’. CANNIBAL ERROR chronicles the phenomenal rise of video culture through a tumultuous decade, its impact and its aftermath. Based on extensive research and interviews, the authors provide a first-hand account of Britain in the 1980s, when video became a scapegoat for a variety of social ills. It examines the confusion spawned by the Video Recordings Act 1984, the subsequent witch hunt that culminated in police raids and arrests, and offers insightful commentary on many contentious and ‘banned’ films that were cited by the media as influential factors in several murder cases. It also investigates the cottage industry in illicit films that developed as a direct result of the ‘video nasty’ clampdown. CANNIBAL ERROR, a revised and reworked edition of SEE NO EVIL (2000), is an exhaustive and startling overview of Britain’s ‘video nasty’ panic, the ramifications of which are still felt today.

Anti-Film Propaganda and the 'Video Nasties' Panic of the 1980s

Cannibal Error

Death on Film and the Enigma of Snuff

Amid the carnage of a brutal civil war in May of 1968, a Biafran Red Cross doctor and his pregnant Swiss wife are separated while attempting to board the last ship to leave Port Harcourt, Biafra, before Nigerian troops arrive. In Sendai, Japan, in March of 2011, a Japanese businessman is trapped in his earthquake damaged boardroom. As tsunami sirens blare, his final thoughts focus on his family and a hidden son living half a world away. These two incidents, so far removed from each other, are brought together when a digital camera of dubious provenance is bought in a Vancouver pawnshop by a mining executive. It is January of 2013 when Darren Westover, still devastated over his wife's sudden death four years earlier, unwittingly buys the stolen camera. He takes a few sample photos and then plugs the camera into his computer to view the pictures. Once he realizes there are images on the memory card that are not his own, Westover starts a search for the camera's rightful owner, unaware that he will soon find himself on a perilous, trans-Pacific journey that brings events from war-torn Biafra and tsunami-ravaged Japan to a climax on the dark, wet streets of Coal Harbour, Vancouver. The Samurai's Son is the intriguing tale of one man's quest for answers as he attempts to piece together a complex puzzle that leads him not only to the truth, but also to a new beginning.

The Samurai's Son

New Social Movements and the State in Latin America

IntroductionIs blood really thicker than water? How far does your religious and cultural history define you as a person? Can a good person do bad things for good reasons and still be a good person?When everything you've thought to be true about yourself turns out to be false, do you burn your bridges and drift along through life, or do you blaze a different path?Some secrets are better left untold. Devastated by the dying revelations of the woman he had believed to be his mother Chan Tai keung felt his privileged world tear apart, he wanted to blow the world apart in retribution. His world was Hong Kong and China. Part of that world was Ben Varley, a jaded and disillusioned expat police officer who had stayed on after Hong Kong had been reunified with China. His world was far from perfect, his life full of human errors in his fight to be true to his own conscience.When despair meets hope, two worlds collide.

The Ties That Bind

This book chronicles the phenomenal rise of video culture and its alleged associations with criminal activity. It contains studies of murder cases supposedly influenced by films, and interviews with the video underground.

Banned Films and Video Controversy

See No Evil

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 and professionally edited by organized groups, such as the militant extremists 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.

David Slater

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