Who would have thought the image of a man being drilled through the forehead would cause so much controversy? Or the image of a naked cannibal feasting on human entrails?
Okay, admittedly quite a number of people, but the 1979 slasher film 'The Driller Killer' and 1980 Italian flick 'Cannibal Holocaust', upon their UK video releases in 1982, were among the films that set the ball rolling in what became a passionate debate about censorship in the United Kingdom. But what was scarier? The films that were targeted or the attitudes and behaviours of enraged media and politicians?
While Video Home System (VHS) technology first emerged in the late 1970s, it was during the decade that followed that it became a regular fixture in households up and down the United Kingdom. However, because of fears over video piracy and a drop in cinema audiences the major distributors initially avoided this market, and it was instead dominated by smaller independent distributors.
While films had to pass the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) prior to cinema release, there was no such process in place for video releases, and therefore films that bypassed the cinema route could be released without any censorship or classification. The Obscene Publications Act (OPA) of 1959 could be used in order to prosecute the distributors and retailers of a film that was felt to be in contravention of the Act, but this would not prevent films from being released in the first instance and was a very inexact science, so more exact guidelines were clearly needed.
it was the provocative titles and the cover art of certain films that was the tipping point
The fact that video technology enabled people to watch films in their homes was a concern to many. In a House of Commons debate (16 March 1984) Conservative MP Sir Bernard Braine summarised the concerns of his political peers of the time: 'In the privacy of the home, it would be possible to slow down a video, dwell on particular scenes and experiment, in a palpably unhealthy way'.
So amidst this backdrop, where people were able to watch uncensored films in their own homes, it was the provocative titles and the cover art of certain films that was the tipping point for many. Blood, nudity, weaponry and swastikas featured prominently on the cover art for titles such as 'SS Experiment Camp', 'I Spit On Your Grave', 'Snuff' and 'Zombie Flesh Eaters'. Taglines like 'The blood runs in rivers … and the drill keeps tearing through flesh and bone' for the aforementioned 'The Driller Killer' added further fuel to the flames.
The 'Daily Mail' was the first national newspaper to report on the dangers of the home video market. In an article titled 'The secret video show' (12 May 1982) it revealed that 'Zombie Flesh Eaters', 'The Exorcist' and 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' were among the most popular videos watched by teenagers. They warned: 'Those innocent Saturday mornings spent watching 'Swap Shop' round at a friend's house could easily turn out to be torrid sex and violence sessions …' Later that month 'The Sunday Times' published an article titled 'How High Street horror is invading the home'. This article was of note because it is believed to be the first time these films were referred to as 'nasties'. It would certainly not be the last …
At the end of 1982 Labour MP Gareth Wardell attempted to introduce a bill to make it a criminal offence to either rent or sell adult videos to children. However on 18 February the following year this bill did not win government approval, which provoked an angry reaction from the 'Daily Mail' in particular. In an article titled 'We Must Protect Our Children Now' (25 February 1983) they declared it was obscene 'that the videos the kids collect in guiltily giggling groups to watch, could not be shown in any British cinema to their parents'.
This was to be the start of the newspaper's campaign titled 'Ban the sadist videos', while stories about nasties influencing the perpetrators of violent crimes began appearing regularly. Mail columnist Lynda Lee-Porter suggested that if strict censorship wasn't enforced 'We're going to have an upsurge of violence and terror and abuse in our land and homes the like of which we never suspected in our wildest terror'.
The 'Daily Mail' ran an editorial titled 'Rape of Our Children's Minds' (30 June 1983) which talked about children buying 'sadism from the video-pusher', women being 'savaged and defiled by youths, weaned on a diet of rape videos' and suggested that this threat was comparable with the rise of The Third Reich with the following text: 'Britain fought the last World War against Hitler to defeat a creed so perverted that it spawned such horrors in awful truth. Now Britain allows our children to be nurtured on these perverted horrors and on any permutation of them under the guise of "entertainment"'.
The BBFC responded to the furore by introducing a voluntary ratings scheme for videos, though the fact that it was voluntary presented an obvious problem, as there was no legal obligation on companies to submit their film for vetting. Meanwhile, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) compiled a list of titles that he believed may contravene the OPA. The list, which was modified on a monthly basis, featured 72 different titles during its various iterations, and dealers and distributors could be prosecuted for holding a copy.
Ultimately just over half of the titles were successfully prosecuted under the OPA, though there was a supplemental list of a further 82 titles which could be seized and destroyed without any criminal prosecution taking place.
Over and above the list police would often seize films based on their covers or title alone, meaning that Dolly Parton's musical 'The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas' and war epic 'The Big Red One' were among the films to be erroneously confiscated.
The social activist Mary Whitehouse also had the nasties in her sights. Whitehouse, founder of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, talks about her campaigning on this front in her autobiography 'Quite Contrary': 'In the spring of 1983 we wrote to every MP (over 600), pointing out the inadequacy of the current film classification system, calling for new legislation … I spoke to a meeting of parliamentarians in the House of Commons and showed some examples of the type of material we were concerned about. Several got up and left the room, which indicated, we were later told, that they felt too sick to see any more'.
Whitehouse also held a fringe event at the Conservative Party Conference in the autumn of 1983 to raise awareness of the issue. Her agitation, combined with continued media coverage, caused momentum to build in the corridors of power, and Conservative backbencher Graham Bright took the lead on a bill to regulate these movies.
That November, in order to garner support for the bill, Bright showed MPs a clip show of some of the worst excesses of the nasties. The first report of a group named the Parliamentary Group Video Enquiry was published that same month, and its claims that 37 per cent of children under the age of seven had seen a 'nasty' added to the moral outrage. Because of the nature of the media coverage and the claims of this report, there were few dissenting voices in either the press or the House of Commons. It was no surprise that Bright's bill proceeded smoothly through Westminster and was granted Royal Assent in July 1984 with little in the way of debate or resistance. The Video Recordings Act 1984 made it a requirement for feature films to be classified by the BBFC before release, and edited or banned if deemed appropriate. Selling or renting unclassified movies, or 15 or 18 rated movies to children under those ages, were also prosecutable offences under the Act.
Having read some of the rhetoric in contemporary media you would think it would not be possible to mount a stout defence against the tighter regulations and the censoring and/or banning of explicit content. As mentioned earlier, the Bill gained approval with little difficulty, and as Peter Fiddick commented in 'The Guardian' (4 November 1983): 'This is a hot issue, and anyone getting in the way too quickly risks being lumped together with child-molesters and sadists'.
Some interesting views and arguments were, however, put across by dissenters. In response to the claims of Sir Bernard Braine and others that home video would allow viewers to revel in explicit scenes by rewinding or pausing, several commentators in Jake West and Marc Morris's excellent documentary 'Video Nasties: moral panic, censorship and videotape' had a counter-argument.
They argued that most of these movies were made by small studios with very little in the way of budget. Therefore close scrutiny would often just highlight the cheap special effects and remove any realism that a cinema viewer may experience. They added that multiple rewinds would damage the tape, meaning that the section in question would be rendered unwatchable fairly quickly.
Films would often be seized by police based on their title or cover art alone
Distributors were often their own worst enemies in that their cover art would highlight and at times exaggerate the worst excesses of a horror film. Indeed the 'Daily Mail' accompanied their 'Ban the sadist videos' articles with the cover art from 'Cannibal Holocaust' to underline exactly what they were rallying against (while seemingly taking the view that their readers were immune to the devastating corruption that they claimed such images would cause).
The same would go with film titles — 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' was only passed by the BBFC in the UK in 1999, a quarter of a century after its release, but in spite of its title the film features a surprising lack of gore. Films would often be seized by police based on their title or cover art alone. Mary Whitehouse admitted that in the early days of the nasties scare, she hadn't seen any of the films she was campaigning against, but said she didn't have to see them to know what they would be like.
Politicians were clearly deemed incorruptible, as there were no fears over the effect the nasties had on them when they were viewing clips of the very worst moments of these films. And many saw this as a skewed and unbalanced exercise in itself, as showing a sequence containing the most violent bits of any film or TV programme would naturally provoke outrage.
Similarly members of the legal profession or the constabulary would often watch these films in full to determine whether they were in breach of the OPA. The scaremongering in the media made references to the dangers of 'illiterate' or 'out-of-work' people getting their hands on these movies. Meanwhile, in the House of Commons (16 March 1984), Conservative MP Harry Greenway made it clear which demographic of society he felt was the most susceptible: 'I confirm from my own research and observation that the first thing that people with redundancy money buy is a video … They are often a higher priority in the homes of people who are not particularly articulate, and who do not read books or listen to music very much. In some homes, videos even take priority over food and furniture'.
So in the eyes of sections of the media and politicians, employment status and education were decisive factors in whether you were deemed at risk of corruption from the nasties. Video horror was a class issue.
Some of the claims about the dangers of these movies at best seemed fanciful, and at their worst were proved to be downright fabrication. Graham Bright said in a television interview that there was research taking place that proved that dogs were upset by nasties as well as children. Oddly enough this research never saw the light of day.
An article in the 'Daily Mirror' (3 January 1984) headlined 'Pony Maniac Strikes Again' reported on a disturbed individual committing sexual assaults on ponies, and contained a quote from a member of the constabulary speculating that 'video nasties or a new moon' could be to blame for the actions of the titular maniac.
Meanwhile Mark Twain's quote about 'lies, damned lies, and statistics' was proven to be accurate, at least according to 'The Guardian' (24 September 1984) — in 'Nasty report that left out the factual niceties' they described how research into children's viewing habits had been 'hijacked and distorted by the Bright Bill crusaders'. Brian Brown, who wrote the article, was credited as associate director on the Parliamentary Group Video Enquiry that claimed 37 per cent of children under seven had watched a 'nasty'. However, he revealed that his research unit at Oxford Polytechnic had 'repudiated the framework, context and conclusions of the entire document' because an academic called Dr Clifford Hill had removed all the written evidence from their unit and independently drafted a report.
Researcher Dr Guy Cumberbatch was similarly dubious of the claims of the Parliamentary Group Video Enquiry, so much so that he visited primary schools to speak to children directly. In order to test the veracity of their information he used a number of fake film titles and more than two thirds of children that he interviewed claimed to have seen one of the non-existent films.
To close the defence of the nasties, here is the concluding paragraph from Brian Brown's article in 'The Guardian': 'In the light of all this, who will wish to see critical decisions affecting public and private behaviour being made in parliament, on the basis of so dubious a project and end-product? But the PR campaign, the distortion of truth, the manipulation of public mood certainly worked. A major piece of legislation has been discussed amidst an atmosphere of moral panic. Such a mood is inimical to the informed debate which, in June 1983, all considered was required'. Most of the 'nasties' of the 1980s have now been released in the retail market, uncut in many cases, and can be watched on DVD or Blu Ray, which allows for a much clearer picture than the grainy days of VHS, as well as a greater capacity for pausing and re-watching.
Cinema and home movie releases are still subject to certification (though things have relaxed somewhat with the introduction of 12 and 12A certificates), but the days of scary movies being heavily cut or banned, and the prosecution of retailers and distributors of these films are largely in the past. And it's not the case that the gore and violence in films has been toned down. Eli Roth's 'Hostel', upon its cinema release in 2006, was referred to as 'torture porn' by film critic David Edelstein due to its protracted graphic violence. The 'Saw' franchise, which began in 2004, has since been given this moniker too. More recent controversial releases include 'The Human Centipede' series of films, which would make even the most hardened of splatter fans wince.
Violent films still periodically get blamed for society's ills, particularly in the wake of tragedies, and in recent years video-sharing sites like YouTube have also emerged to offer access to just about anything you care to imagine (and quite a few things you may prefer not to). Some video nasties horror fans may have found that their own thresholds of what is acceptable have since been tested by this new content.
In the 1980s, new home technology brought the debate about taste and acceptability in entertainment not just on to the front pages, but the House of Commons. But despite the outcry and legislation, it was a genre that proved to be incredibly popular throughout the decade.
