Synopsis

S&MAN is a movie about voyeurism and underground horror, focusing on our balance of sympathy and sadism when we watch death. JT Petty, a filmmaker responsible for his own underground horror films, tracks down and interviews psychologists, scholars, actors, and most importantly—the underground and extreme filmmakers themselves. Horror, S&MAN posits, is a specific pleasure: the more we suffer in watching it, the better. We want horror movies to hurt us. S&MAN explores and exercises that idea, asking why we are compelled to watch, and more than that, why we like it. The brains of S&MAN are structured around interviews with a horror scholar, a sexologist, and a forensic psychiatrist, who describe for us the connections between voyeurism, culture, and sadistic watching. The heart of the film, however, comes from the filmmakers who choose horror as their specialty. Through interviews, on-set filming, and home visits, JT and his crew are pulled deeper into the world of underground horror. The film scrutinizes subjects who are, if not outright liars, at least intent on blurring the line between themselves and the movies they make. Boundaries are crossed: between filmmaker and subject, witness and participant, reality and fiction. The movie hones in on the topic of violence and sadistic watching, boiling it down to a discussion about snuff, about real murder on film, and the audience who's watching.

Official Review

Movies like Paranormal Activity and The Last Exorcism are often scoffed at – sight unseen – by horror fans, more or less because of the overwhelming amount of DTV digital handheld flicks that are dumped into the marketplace every year. Most viewers associate handheld shooting techniques with words like “cheap”, “motion-sickness”, and “Asylum”, but the truth is that those films don’t fall under the voyeuristic umbrella of cinema veritae; they just have inexperienced cinematographers manning cheap cameras, resulting in unintentional “shaky cam” that will later be said by the filmmakers to be intentional. But no other recent film has tackled the subject of what is appealing and makes them work like S&MAN, an unsettling faux-doc that will leave most feeling like they need a shower. …Read More