J.T. Petty’s well-made look at the underground world of pseudo-snuff horror movies troubled me more for its final thesis than for what it actually shows onscreen. While featuring interviews with real-life filmmakers, actors and academics (including a personal hero of mine, Men, Women and Chain Saws author Carol J. Clover), the film’s dominant narrative comes from the fictional investigation into the cinematic activities of a doughy loser named Eric Rost (Eric Marcisak).
As the man behind the titular S&Man (pronounced “sandman”) series, which consists of him stalking attractive women on camera before killing them onscreen, Eric is reluctant to give away his filmmaking methods — afraid that doing so will undermine his reputation and mystique. Unable to contact any of the women who have appeared in the films, Petty (playing himself) is faced with the very real possibility that Eric’s product is the genuine article.
It’s no easy task to combine the real and the fictional as well as Petty does here, but ultimately, I found myself troubled by the conclusions he reaches. In his final narration, he tells us that we watch horror movies knowing that the violence is fake, while wishing it were real — which, in my case, simply isn’t true.
The fact is, I am generally indifferent to the violence in horror movies — I enjoy them for other reasons I don’t have the time or space to go into — and I am able to watch them without self-inflicting psychic trauma because I am able to take comfort in the knowledge that what I am seeing isn’t real. To suggest otherwise is to indict myself with a cultural crime I have not committed.
The other problem with Petty’s thesis is that in order to fully exploit it, he ruins the film’s delicate balance between journalism and fiction. It simple isn’t credible that a conscionable documentarian wouldn’t, at a certain point, take what they have learned about Eric’s activities and report them to the police. And while Petty’s inaction is meant to support his apparent contention that there is little difference between real and staged violence, it instead only works to prove how ultimately misguided that contention is. —Allan Mott
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Written and directed by Howard R. Cohen, the auteur also responsible for the original 
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