Mark Lewis meets Dora, a prostitute, covertly filming her with a camera hidden under his coat. Shown from the point of view of the camera viewfinder, tension builds as he follows the woman into her home, murders her and later watches the film in his den as the credits roll on the screen.
The film starts as Angela sits on a subway. The train halts and passengers are told to evacuate, as a man has just stepped in front of the tracks and died. While being led out of the station, Angela begins to move towards the tracks to see the man's remains. She is warded away at the last instant. Angela is a university student in Madrid, writing a thesis on audiovisual violence in the family. At a thesis meeting, she asks her thesis director, Figueroa, to help her find the most violent videos in the school's library. After class, Angela seeks out the help of a fellow student, Chema, who is known for his collection of violent and pornographic videos. As Angela begins to watch violent films with Chema, Professor Figueroa finds a tape in a hidden hallway of the school's audiovisual archives. The next day, Angela finds Figueroa dead of apparent heart failure in the university's viewing room, a video tape in the player. Angela takes the tape and leaves for class. She later learns that Figueroa died of an asthma attack, and that a younger professor, Castro, will now be directing her thesis project. Angela goes to Chema's house to watch the stolen film, and Chema realizes that this is a snuff film, or a film of someone actually being murdered. As they watch the women being tortured, killed and disemboweled, Chema realizes that the women in the film was named Vanessa, a girl who attended their university and went missing two years ago. Chema and Angela are also able to determine which kind of camera the killer used, and XT 500, based on the quality of its digital zoom, and that the film was shot in someone's garage.
Ben is a witty, charismatic serial killer who holds forth at length about whatever comes to mind, be it the "craft" of murder, the failings of architecture, his own poetry, or classical music, which he plays with his girlfriend. A film crew joins him on his sadistic adventures, recording them for a fly on the wall documentary. Ben takes them to meet his family and friends while boasting of murdering many people at random and dumping their bodies in canals and quarries. The viewer witnesses these grisly killings in graphic detail.
Max Renn (Woods) is the president of CIVIC-TV, a UHF television station in Toronto that specializes in sensationalistic programming. Displeased with his station's current lineup, Max is looking for something that will break through to a new audience. One morning, he is summoned to the clandestine office of Harlan (Peter Dvorsky), who operates CIVIC-TV's pirate satellite dish which can intercept international broadcasts. Harlan shows him Videodrome, a plotless show apparently being broadcast out of Malaysia which depicts the brutal torture and murder of anonymous victims in a reddish-orange chamber. Believing this to be the future of television (seemingly staged snuff TV), Max orders Harlan to begin pirating the program.
In the last two days of 1999, Los Angeles has become a dangerous war zone. As a group of criminals rob a Chinese restaurant, the event is recorded by a robber wearing a 'SQUID', or "Superconducting Quantum Interference Device", an illegal electronic device which records events directly from the wearer's cerebral cortex, and when played back through a MiniDisc-like device called a "deck", allow a user to experience the recorder's memories and physical sensations. Lenny Nero is a former LAPD officer turned black marketeer who deals in bootleg SQUID recordings. His main supplier, Tick (Richard Edson), tries to sell the robbery clip to him. Lenny eventually agrees to buy it at a reduced price, having to cut out the last part where the rig records the robber's death by falling; clips that record the wearer's death are known as "blackjack" (snuff) clips, because the experience is described as "jacking into the big black" by Tick.
This film opens with a home video of the slaughter with a captive bolt pistol of a pig on a European farm. The video rewinds to play the slaughter in slow motion, which emphasizes the hand-held barrel against the pig's fore-skull and the cartridge explosion. A party centered on a game called Pilot and Passengers is broken up by Georg and Anna, when they return home while the party is in progress. The host of the party, Eva, is their daughter who lives in another part of town and who has, it turns out in questioning of Benny after the incident, taken advantage of the planned absence of Georg and Anna to host the impromptu party in their home. While watching a newscast, Georg and Anna discuss the money Eva won in the pyramid scheme she was promoting at the party. In a locker room at school, Benny encourages his friends to take positions in his own Pilot and Passengers game.
Henry is a drifter who murders scores of people - men, women and children - as he travels through the country. He migrates to Chicago, where he stops at a diner, eats dinner, and kills two waitresses.
Jake Van Dorn (George C. Scott) is a prosperous local businessman in Grand Rapids, Michigan who has strong Calvinist convictions. A single parent, Van Dorn is the father of a seemingly quiet, conservative teenage girl, Kristen, who inexplicably disappears when she goes on a church-sponsored trip to Bellflower, California. Andy Mast (Peter Boyle), a strange private investigator from Los Angeles, is then hired to find her, eventually turning up an 8mm stag film of his daughter with two young men.
The film opens with Super 8 footage depicting a family of four standing beneath a tree with sacks over their heads and nooses around their necks. An unseen figure saws through a branch acting as a counterweight, causing their deaths by hanging.
Billy (Marina Zudina), an FX make up artist who does not have the physical ability to speak, is in Moscow working on a low budget slasher film directed by her sister's boyfriend Andy (Evan Richards). On one particular night Billy returns to the set to fetch a piece of equipment for the next day's shoot when she is accidentally locked in the studio. Being unable to speak but having the ability to communicate with her sister Karen (Fay Ripley), Billy makes several telephone calls but is interrupted when she discovers a small film crew working after hours to shoot a cheap porno film. Watching unseen Billy is amused until the performed sex becomes sadistic. When a masked actor pulls out a knife and stabs the actress (Olga Tolstetskaya), Billy reacts and is discovered. She flees pursued by the homicidal film crew.
In the near future, big wars are avoided by giving individuals with violent tendencies a chance to kill in the Big Hunt. The Hunt is the most popular form of entertainment in the world and also attracts participants who are looking for fame and fortune. It includes ten rounds for each competitor, five as the hunters and five as the victims. The survivor of ten rounds becomes extremely wealthy and retires. Scenes switch between the pursuit, romance between a hunter and a victim, with a narrator explaining the rules and justification of the Hunt.
Private investigator Tom Welles (Nicolas Cage) is contacted by Daniel Longdale (Anthony Heald), attorney for wealthy widow Mrs. Christian (Myra Carter), whose husband has recently died. While clearing out her late husband's safe, she and Longdale found an 8mm film which appears to depict a real murder of a girl, but Mrs. Christian wants to know for certain.
The film is shot in the style of a reality TV series. Five new contestants are selected in a random lottery and, along with the winner of the previous series, comprise the six Contenders. The film purposely leaves many key details unexplained, as the viewer is supposed to be watching only what the creators actually aired in the fictional TV show. How the show became so powerful as to randomly select people to be killed is unexplained, but the Contenders treat it as something they cannot control. Contenders are given a pistol, though they may acquire other weapons, and the last one left alive is the winner. Contestants are forced to play the game, regardless of their wishes. A contender who wins three tours of the game is freed from it.
A man knocks on a teenage girl's door, claiming to be in need of directions. When the girl leaves to answer the phone, the man sneaks in, and grabs her when she returns. Physically and verbally assaulting the girl, the man drags her into a bedroom by the neck, and rapes her. The rapist ejaculates and urinates on the teen's face, and asphyxiates her with a bag while yelling that Richard Ramirez is his "God". Tracking the killer is obnoxious Channel 5 Action News reporter Roberto Negro, who has been receiving taunting letters from the murderer, most of them containing rants about how he worships Satan.