In 8MM, a widow asks private detective Tom Welles (played by Nicholas Cage) to find out whether a film in the safe of her late husband, in which a young woman is murdered, is a real or simulated “snuff film.” Her attorney Longdale (played by Anthony Heald) picks Welles, as he seems to be an amateur who will not find out the truth. However, Welles assumes the film to be real and tries to track down the young woman, starting with the Missing Persons Bureau in Cleveland and ending up in the film capitals of Hollywood and New York. Posing as a buyer of snuff films, he runs into the moguls of the industry, Eddie Poole and Dino Velvet (played by James Gandolfini and Peter Stormare), who in turn try to snuff him out. Similar to the cop pursuing a sadomasochistic serial killer of gays in William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980), Welles is negatively transformed by the quest to find a Satan. The snuff film’s producer turns out to be the lawyer who sends him on his way in the first place. The tagline of the film is “You can’t prepare for where the truth will take you,” meaning that Welles learns that snuff films do exist, and that the world of S&M; snuff films is primarily for men who lust for full control of women. Directed by Joe Schumacher, 8MM is film noir in which the hero triumphs but the sickness of the porn industry seems beyond anything that filmviewers may want to know about. The film is based on the novel by Andrew Kevin Walker. MH