It seems difficult to imagine now, when almost any film anyone would care to watch is no more than a few mouse clicks away, but it was only in the early 1980s that home video was a fresh and revolutionary cultural innovation. As with many other new and unproven technologies, the so-called "establishment" — in this case, the large Hollywood film studios — was slow to see the potential. In the UK, the burgeoning video market was served by many upstart distribution companies who managed to get their hands on cheap non-Hollywood product to pass on to their customers. This product ended up consisting almost entirely of horror films that had not been previously released in the UK, and had not been vetted by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC). The bulk of these were American, Italian, or Asian imports, and all were notable for their shocking violence and buckets of gore.
The Beginning of the Video Nasties Controversy
For two years after the horror films began flooding the market, companies supplied their product with little public outcry. But in 1982, a full page ad for the Abel Ferrara film Driller Killer appeared in a few video magazines and generated complaints for its explicit nature. The ball really got rolling, though, when Go Video, the distributors of Cannibal Holocaust, sent a copy of their film (as well as a bogus "complaint") to Mary Whitehouse of the Viewers' and Listeners' Association as a publicity stunt. Unfortunately for them, the stunt worked a little too well, and Whitehouse stirred up massive public and government outrage against what she and many other conservative commentators took to be degenerate filth that encouraged violent behavior. Though at the dawn of the 1980s there was no specific law regulating the content of home videos, there was the Obscene Publications Act, which had been passed in 1959 and updated in 1977 to regulate porn films. This law would become the justification for the censorship that followed.
Confusion and Film Seizures
At first, there were no concrete guidelines about which films were fair game for censorship or seizure, and this led to some comical misunderstandings, as in one raid on a video shop where films like the Dolly Parton vehicle The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and the war film The Big Red One were taken off the shelves, apparently because raiding constables believed they were pornographic. There was also no consistency in the titles that were seized; for example, films like Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead and John Carpenter's remake of The Thing were seized in some areas, and left on the shelves in others. Finally, video retailers, who were understandably confused about what they were allowed to stock, called for a definitive list, and it was duly supplied in 1983 by the Department of Public Prosecutions (DPP).
The Video Nasties List
All in all, roughly 74 titles appeared on the DPP's list during the period when it was active. Of these films, 35 were eventually dropped because prosecution against them failed, leaving 39 which were seized from video shops and banned. At various times, the list included everything from H.G. Lewis's groundbreaking splatter flick Blood Feast (1963) to the notorious Umberto Lenzi-directed Cannibal Ferox (1981) to Dario Argento's gorgeous (and not terribly gory) Inferno (1980) to Sam Raimi's horror-comedy classic The Evil Dead (1982). More salacious titles included The Beast In Heat (1977), Faces of Death (1979), Gestapo's Last Orgy (1977), and Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979).
In 1985 the Video Recordings Act was passed, which made illegal the sale of any film that had not been certified by the BBFC, thereby rendering the list unnecessary, though it remained officially in force until the mid 1990s. Many of the films on the list remained unavailable for years, and a few (like the aforementioned Beast In Heat, as well as Cannibal Apocalypse and Deep River Savages) are unavailable to this day, though some were later reviewed by the BBFC and passed for release, either uncut or with the objectionable material trimmed out. British fans of extreme horror may ultimately have to be content with censorship, or choose to purchase the films uncut from foreign sources.
Additional Source:
Martin, John. Seduction of the Gullible: The Truth Behind the Video Nasty Scandal (2007). Stray Cat Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-0953326181.
