The idea of the snuff movie has been cultural mythology for decades, inspiring movies, books, and internet legends. A snuff movie is essentially a murder, filmed and distributed for commercial purposes. The existence of genuine snuff has never been proven… Until now.
In late July, a video that has become known as The Vietnamese Butcher began circulating on Telegram and other encrypted messaging apps, showing a man lying on his back in a tiled room, masturbating. At the point of climax, a second man decapitates him with a meat cleaver in a few expert strokes, then drags the head off the body.
Further footage shows alternate angles of the killing and its aftermath: professional butchery of the corpse. Finally, a montage shows body parts stacked up, intestines separated, followed by images of some kind of traditional Asian dish containing an unidentified meat. A longer version doing the rounds on gore sites is preceded by what appears to be a dry-run. The executioner, wearing Adidas and a cheap Anonymous mask, caresses the victim’s neck with a cleaver, then mimes landing a couple of blows. Already kneeling with his head on a block, the victim straightens up and is hugged by his killer.
There is a lot of death footage on the internet: ISIS propaganda, cartel chainsaw beheadings, murders caught on CCTV. Yet none of these fit the “snuff” designation as they are not recorded deliberately for commercial profit. Other notable exceptions also fail to hit the mark. In 2001, after years of trying, the German cannibal Armin Mewes met a consenting victim on a site called Cannibal Café. He filmed around four hours of footage of himself attempting to eat hacked-off pieces of—and eventually killing—43-year-old Bernd Brandt but it has never leaked into the public domain. Another German, Detlev Guenzel, found his willing victim on the website Zambian Meat. He filmed the strangulation and dismemberment, but the 50-minute film was sealed as police evidence. In summer 2012, Luka Magnotta sparked a global manhunt after recording and uploading a video of himself killing a Chinese university student. Entitled 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick, it led to the temporary shut down of BestGore.com and created a media frenzy. Again, though, none of these were true snuff because they were not produced for commercial gain. While The Vietnamese Butcher has not drawn anything like as much international attention as these cases—in fact, VICE is the first established media outlet to report on its existence—evidence suggests it was recorded to be sold online, potentially making it the first bona fide snuff film to find its way out into the world.
As you’d expect, online sleuths have been working overtime to put names to the victim and the killer. They’ve so far deduced that both speak with regional Vietnamese accents and have identified which shop sold the floor tiles upon which the victim lay masturbating, as well as the brands that made the executioner’s meat cleaver and the chopsticks seen laid out next to the ominous dish of meat. The current consensus is that the killing took place in central or northern Vietnam, or possibly Cambodia. The detectives point to distinctive moles and tattoos as proof that the footage features the same two people throughout. There is even a photo of a severed erect penis doing the rounds, though after considered analysis severed penis experts have subsequently debunked its links to the film.
As of today, the theory is that the victim—who appears to have been a willing participant in his own demise—was Nguyễn Xuân Đạt, a Vietnamese man who frequented extreme fetish message boards like Motherless for several years, using aliases like “Dat Beheading.” Somewhat of a twink, he’d also had an account on Watch People Die, a cutesy gamified community of anons who gather to share… you guessed it: footage of people dying.
Almost all of Đạt’s known accounts make reference to his beheading fetish. On hookup sites, he spoke freely to both men and women about his death wish, a topic of conversation not unusual in the kind of circles Đạt was moving in. Screenshots show him asking someone for a translation of an ero guro called Applicant for Death, which features a plot similar to his own demise with the notable additions of incest, a guillotine, and a talking decapitated head.
The internet has, of course, gone to great lengths to identify the killer in the video. Using slightly spurious face-merging techniques, posters at WPD, Reddit, Facebook, Tam Tan Luong Tam, and XAMVN have arrived at a theory that the “butcher” is in fact a Buddhist who had previously interacted with Đạt on various message boards. Yet the Buddhist in question has denied any involvement, leaving the mob of online obsessives to fixate upon the sole identifying mark in the movie: a tattoo that reads “13-9” on the executioner’s arm. (This has led to the case being known by the shorthand “13K,” a hashtag that somehow relates to the prices of butchered pigs on Vietnamese social media.) Meanwhile, someone claiming to be the executioner currently has control of Đạt’s Facebook account.
“Not only am I ugly, but I’m also full of diseases. I can’t afford to live freely like normal folks. I have to depend on my parents my whole life. What else could I do? I truly am a prisoner of my very own fate. If it wasn’t because of God, I would’ve ended my life already… I wish to meet someone that (once we’ve become close enough) could kill me. Because I really wanted to make friends with such people, but I know that once l’ve done that, I won’t be normal again. I wanna die.”
A private message purportedly sent by apparent snuff film victim Nguyễn Xuân Đạt, translated from a screenshot
Theories about motives have started to percolate. There is a screenshot floating around where Đạt claims to be dying, implying that—if it is him in the film—his death could’ve been a form of extreme sexualized euthanasia. A Facebook account running under the username Phi Le posted about the killing, claiming to know both the victim and perpetrator. Phi Le runs an online BDSM community that has links to asphyxiation and cannibalism communities. One of these accounts features a stream of generative-AI produced clips of hooded figures stroking knives across bound women’s necks.
If The Vietnamese Butcher was made with commercial gain in mind, it’s already ‘succeeding.’ Eleven clips and 98 photos of the beheading have been available to buy as a pack on the dark web and in Telegram channels since February. This footage shows the execution from multiple different camera angles, so it seems likely that the victim at the very least consented to the retail of his death. It is also possible that he actively encouraged it.
“Price is 89 Yuan to join the regular group. 198 to join the large group. It’s a stable group that’s been around for four or five years. Dumping corpses, body dismembering, execution etc, necrophilia is in the ‘ice love’ group… if you just want pure clean bodies, that’s called ‘forensic’…”
A Chinese distributor of extreme content shops his wares on Telegram
At the time of writing, other similar cases have started to surface. Although identities and details are currently unknown, the footage again features butchered Asian men, and was shared on the Chinese messaging app Baidu Tieba, which is often used for criminality.
In the process of researching this story, VICE spoke to a Chinese distributor of hardcore clips on Telegram; they offered to sell us access to groups in which tens of thousands of users share thousands of image packs with themes including heavy necrophilia, mortuary footage, drugged rape, and worse. While The Vietnamese Butcher may be the first authentic snuff movie, it is unlikely to be the last.
Special thanks to Victor Mihail for research assistance and Pea Maximus Jones for translation.
Follow Ben Ditto on Instagram @ben_ditto
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