8MM (Joel Schumacher, 1999) Review

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“Not many people have been inside this room.” When a wealthy industrialist dies, his widow discovers a disturbing reel of 8mm film, so she employs a Private Investigator to verify if it's real or fake. Plunged into a downward spiral of depravity, this movie takes the viewer on a Grimm fairytale set during the dying days of the 20^th Century just before the World Wide Web was able to spread unlimited perversions on a grand scale...

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“What's all the trouble, Cinderella?” Tom Welles (Nicolas Cage, The Rock, Willy's Wonderland) is a PI who aspires to greater circles of trust and connections, having just concluded a sensitive case for a U.S. Senator with powerful friends. He lives in a quiet, leafy, and entirely unremarkable suburban house with his wife Amy (Catherine Keener, The 40 Year-Old Virgin) and their infant daughter, their existence unspoiled and removed from the sins of the wider world – and yet there is a crack through which his personal and work lives will merge.

This gentle family man, whose darkest secret is lying to his wife about smoking (his first instinct on starting his next case is to spark up a cigarette and spray air freshener), will soon find himself tainted and tortured by the shadow world – and this is how director Joel Schumacher's murky post-Se7en thriller crosses the point of no return.

“Sometimes you can't know what I'm doing; it's better that way.” Hired by the recently widowed Mrs Christian (Myra Carter) and her lawyer Mr Longdale (Anthony Heald, The Silence of The Lambs), Welles is exposed to the grimy loop of 8mm film, which she discovered inside her late husband's office safe. Flinching at the violent acts contained within – the apparent murder of a young woman – he agrees to take the case, albeit playing down the supposed reality of the film reel, putting it down to filmmaking techniques and well-hidden special effects.

Now that Welles has set foot into a new level of sin, he enters into a world where up to a million people go missing every year, a world confined by dark walls and dull skies where Mary Ann Mathews – the girl identified to have been in the film – disappeared six years prior, leaving her mother Janet (Amy Morton) haunted by the bleak, grey-washed agony of not knowing what happened to her daughter.

“Wouldn't want to embarrass yourself in front of your fellow perverts.” Mary Ann had dreams of Hollywood, and so Welles begins roaming the seedy, stinking corners of Los Angeles: Skid Row, street walker central, neon-drenched nudie bars, grubby casting offices, and an adult book store – the structure almost on the brink of collapse for the sheer weight of the smut weighing down its shelves – where he meets his guide into this previously unknown world: Max California (Joaquin Phoenix, Joker). Hiding a Truman Capote novel inside the dust jacket of a tawdry piece of porno 'literature', there is a biting streak of sarcasm that runs through Max, cutting the tragic figure of an unwanted punk rocker who can't get it made and has found himself in a quagmire of perverts in rain macs.

“I don't buy it, I don't endorse it, I just point the way.” Unknowingly being observed from a distance, and lead by Max (who is eager to latch onto the chance to do something worthwhile with his life) Welles descends ever deeper into the sweaty pits of greasy Los Angeles and New York City – all bile-yellows and blue shadows – as they follow the breadcrumbs and unfurl the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the woebegone girl in the 8mm loop.

There is a hint of Hollywood gloss to Joel Schumacher's (Tigerland, Phone Booth) film, a light veil of safety, but it is frequently pulled away to expose the viewer to memorably grim scenes. One such haunting moment, which was seared into my mind upon first viewing it twenty-five years ago, is when Max brings Welles to an underground market for all things sordidly sexual, a hellishly gloomy concrete bunker dripping with grime and the air heavy with a carcinogenic fog drifting from one grubby fold-out stall to another.

Welles' reaction to one particular table – labelled with marker pen on a scrap of cardboard, stating “kids” above packages of Polaroid photographs – is to literally wipe his fingers on the lapel of his jacket. The festering filth of this hideous new world in which he has willingly entered for mostly noble reasons is getting under his fingernails and, much like the stale fug of cigarette smoke that his wife smelled on his clothes when he returned home from his previous job, he is becoming tainted by the infection of it all.

“There's things that you'll see that you can't un-see and they'll stay there.” Indeed, each time Welles views the 8mm loop he becomes increasingly desensitised to its content, to the point that the third time we see him viewing it (he's likely watched it dozens of times), he's barely aware of the horrors unspooling in front of him as he scans sleazy advertisements in the back of jazz mags while talking to his wife on the phone.

The increasingly crepuscular society that Welles now walks amongst – rainy alleyways, industrial ruins, and so many low-rent hotels where nobody asks questions – are all superbly photographed by Robert Elswit (Boogie Nights, Nightcrawler). Every inch of his widescreen frame oozes with bleak details and years of layered grunginess, capturing the phantasmagorical work of Gary Wissner (Production Designer), Gershon Ginsburg (Art Director), and Gary Fettis (Set Decorator). The dilapidated office of Celebrity Films' casting agent Eddie Poole (James Gandolfini, The Sopranos, The Drop) looks like it no doubt smells, while the 'gothic hardcore' inner sanctum of the avantgarde 'Fellini of Filth' Dino Velvet (Peter Stormare, Fargo, Constantine), hidden amongst the prostitutes and butchered animals of NYC's Meat Packing District, appears like the disgorged mind of a shameless cousin of the killer from Se7en.

“The Devil's changing you already.” The world in 8MM regularly feels strangely familiar yet quite foreign. The location where the 8mm loop was filmed, for instance, sits in the hills overlooking the twinkling lights of Los Angeles, but what was once a slice of the dream factory is now a tattered, graffiti-covered husk where the stench of bad secrets linger. Even the music in the film unsettles the viewer: Mychal Danna's score switches from jangled Moroccan vocals and instruments (like the discordant clatter of a bustling market) to sickly industrial grit that sounds like the grinding gurgle of a drainage pipe. Meanwhile, a needle drop from Aphex Twin – “Come To Daddy” – very effectively inspires spasmodic jitters, certainly to those who were, at the time of the film's release, unfamiliar with the acid techno drum 'n' bass howls of 'I will eat your soul!'

“There's no such thing as snuff.” Written by Andrew Kevin Walker (Se7en, The Killer), the film was infamously denounced by the scribe when the studio – which considered the film 'dangerous' – insisted on changes to appease the suits, which he refused to implement. In the case of Se7en a few years prior, the notorious reveal at the end only made the final cut because actor Brad Pitt had it protected in his contract, and it's frankly now quite incredible that Hollywood put out a movie as confrontational and grim as that, one which has nonetheless gone on to be an audience favourite. 8MM had some battles with the MPAA, trimming on-screen hardcore pornographic material and moments of bloody violence after it was originally slammed with the dreaded NC-17 rating – still a curse, despite the best efforts of Paul Verhoeven's glamorously squalid film Showgirls – but before it reached that stage, other tweaks were made, leading to Walker's decision to wash his hands of the production.

The climax of the film certainly has a more 'Hollywood' feel to it, leading to a fight in a rain-lashed cemetery, while the original ending – which would have been quite hopeless after two hours of being doused in sleaze and muck – was toned down. The 'uncompromisingly uncomfortable' vibe of the original script was softened in certain scenes, and while Walker's reaction is understandable, the film still became a cult hit for viewers. Indeed, certain reported changes arguably work in the film's favour – the change in the physical appearance of Machine (Chris Bauer, The Deuce), for instance, makes his reveal all the more disturbing and memorable.

“There's not much illegal out there.” While tamped-down somewhat, Welles' return to the normal world still carries with it a woefully preoccupied sensibility. Throughout the film Cage gives a subtle and gentle performance, far removed from his gaudier performances (e.g. Face Off), successfully showing the degradation of a relatively clean soul who stumbles back from the shadow world as a traumatised man. Welles is the frog who was thrown into a pot of boiling water and leapt out, whereas Max sat there as the temperature rose gradually. There is a glimmer of hope for him, but only a glimmer … Walker's original ending might have been too much to stomach for the audience, and yet the changes help add to the upside down fairytale nature of the story. Irrevocable change has still taken place, while sights and deeds will continue to discolour his soul.

While Cinderella (Welles' nickname for his daughter) puts a tragic home life of abuse and subjugation behind to become the belle of the ball, Tom Welles experiences quite the opposite, unaware that when he leaves a cosy suburban family life behind he is about to fall into the despairing depths of society's unlit corners where dreams go to die and predators feast on the innocent. Perhaps, in the hands of another director (David Fincher was considered), the darkest hues of Walker's script may have stayed put, but by the sounds of it, much of what remains still plays in the same pissed-in sandpit of broken glass and discarded prophylactics.

“You trust me to take your money but not your picture?” A quarter of a century on, 8MM is a fascinating snapshot of the last gasp of the analogue age at its sleaziest, a few years before the World Wide Web proliferated hardcore smut at lightning speed across the globe. Indeed, the relative liberation, autonomy, and clean remoteness of online services like OnlyFans have played their part in the steep decline of strip clubs, while the likes of Adam & Eve have pushed sex retailers towards plush mainstream comfort for couples and away from seedy hovels with manky carpets. At the time of the film's production the notion of snuff (beyond Faces of Death, Budd Dwyer, and Christine Chubbuck) was very much a myth – but now? The specifics of what constitutes the truest definition of 'snuff' is up for debate, but the War on Terror post-9/11 exposed the mainstream to real murder captured on-camera, while 24/7 news livestreams all manner of clickbait human suffering onto your chosen device in an instant. Is the notion of people paying to view real murder for pleasure such an outré prospect in this social and technological context? Certainly, there have been rumours and stories in the intervening years about suspicious and hard-to-find sites on the Dark Web catering to that very thing – one such story inspired Eli Roth's Hostel films.

8MM is a well crafted dark thriller, and it now raises questions about the expansion of extremely niche market tastes into mainstream attention and/or broader acceptance – the viral craze of Two Girls One Cup is perhaps the earliest example of this post-millennial societal shift, prefiguring the headline-grabbing antics of Bonnie Blue et al by decades. Further to that, viewing the film now also proffers the question of 'at what point does expression and a variety of personal tastes for consenting entertainment segue into addiction and increasingly unhealthy explorations?' Is corruption inevitable, the tarnishing of innocence when parental control is abandoned, or is it that the darkest of souls walking among us now just simply have alternative means to share their dysfunction with those of a similar disposition – people who are inconceivably far beyond the mainstream? Both are likely as valid as each other. Where is the line now drawn between fact and fiction, as lies masquerade as truth and actuality is dismissed as falsehood?

“I would choose to know. I need to know.” It's also worth pointing out that films like 8MM and Se7en have pushed the boundaries of society, of filmmaking, and of what the viewer is able to stomach – much like their predecessors at various watershed moments in media history. I was barely into my teens, if that, when I first saw Se7en and it shocked and unnerved me like few films have – the Gluttony, Sloth, and Lust murders in particular – while 8MM played a part in exposing the viewer to real pornography (albeit edited down to the point of acceptability for the MPAA) in the case of the enema film being screened during the underground market scene, as other productions have done before and since.

Perhaps one's own visceral reactions to these cinematic experiences is a good sign that abject disaffection is not at hand, and it is always valuable to remind those of a censorious disposition of the clear difference between reality and fiction, of what is faked in a realistic manner and what is genuinely real. Whatever the creative medium, it is possible to become somewhat inured to dark material, but there is a vast chasm of difference between that and the authentic horrors of the real world, which never cease to shock and appall.