Banned, cut and confiscated

In 1984 the British Board of Film Censors refused Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper a certificate. Refusing a certificate was ordinary work; the Board had been doing it since 1912. What its director James Ferman did next was not. He had the print driven to the airport and flown back to its owners in Italy, on the reasoning that a refusal counted for little while the reels were still on British soil where a copy could be struck. Most films that fall foul of a censor get banned. This one got deported.

There was never one way to ban a film

The word "banned" flattens a set of very different machines. A state can prosecute the man who sells the tape and stand him in the dock next to the cassette. It can run a board that refuses the film a category, so that selling it becomes illegal by omission. Or it can leave the film technically legal while stripping it of every shelf, advertisement and shop window, so it survives only in a form nobody can find. Britain, Australia and West Germany each built one of these, all in the same handful of years, aimed at more or less the same stack of Italian and American genre pictures.

Britain made the shopkeeper the criminal

Britain's answer was the Video Recordings Act 1984, and the video nasty entry covers how the panic was built, so here is only the mechanism. Before the Act a tape needed no certificate at all. The Act made the distributor the offender: every video offered for sale or hire now needed a certificate from the newly renamed British Board of Film Classification, and supplying one without it was a crime. The Director of Public Prosecutions had already circulated a list of titles his office thought a jury would convict, the video nasties, and that list is where most of the films in this piece first met a British court. What matters here is what the Board did with the power once it had it.

Ferman took it personally

For most of a quarter century the Board was James Ferman. He ran the BBFC from 1975 to 1999 as a personal fief, and his governing conviction was that tape was more dangerous than film, because a cinema showed a thing once to a booked adult audience while a cassette sat in the house to be run as often as anyone in it liked. So he cut harder for video than he ever had for the screen, and titles that had passed in cinemas came back bleeding.

He kept private grudges too. The Exorcist was never a nasty and had played British cinemas in 1974, but Ferman disliked it on video and declined to certify it for the format, so for fifteen years the most famous horror film in the world could not legally be rented in Britain. It was passed uncut in 1999, the year he left. He kept the nunchaku, the swung chainsticks of kung fu pictures, off British screens for the same stretch on the theory that children would copy them. And The New York Ripper he had flown back to Italy rather than let a single British copy exist.

Australia does not cut, it refuses

Australia never bothered with the criminal-shopkeeper approach because it owned something blunter. The classification board can hand a film the category Refused Classification. An RC film cannot legally be sold, hired, imported, advertised or shown to a paying audience anywhere in the country. There is no negotiated cut on the way in and no adults-only shelf to catch it, only a wall. Australia is close to the only English-speaking democracy that still runs the mechanism as a live import barrier, and it still reaches for it, refusing A Serbian Film in 2010 and the second Human Centipede in 2011.

It caught the canon early. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was kept out of the country for the better part of a decade, I Spit on Your Grave was pulled from sale in 1997 after fifteen years on the shelves, and Cannibal Holocaust was turned away for decades. The joke underneath it is that Australia was, in exactly these years, making its own exploitation cinema by the drive-in-full, Turkey Shoot and the rest of the Ozploitation shelf that has its own piece here. The board refused the imports and passed the local product, because the local product had been built to fit the certificate and the imports had not.

West Germany did not ban you, it disappeared you

West Germany ran the strangest machine of the three, and the one hardest to explain to anyone raised on a plain ban. A federal board, the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften (the BPjS, renamed BPjM in 2003), kept a register called the index, and a film placed on it, indiziert, was not illegal. You could own it, make it, and an adult could, with effort, buy it. What the index removed was every ordinary way of learning it existed. An indexed film could not be advertised, could not be displayed openly in a shop, could not be sold by mail order or handed to anyone under eighteen, and could not sit on a rental shelf where a minor might read the spine. The film stayed legal and turned invisible, which for a commercial product is the same as dead.

Beneath the index sat a harder tool. A court could order a film confiscated outright under the penal code's clause on depictions of violence, and confiscation was a real seizure that made selling it a crime. Plenty of horror collected both. The Evil Dead was indexed and then confiscated within months, both in 1984, and stayed under the seizure for a generation. Italian gore went the same way in bulk, Zombi 2 and Zombie Holocaust among the tapes pulled out of German circulation. The purest case was homegrown. Jörg Buttgereit's Nekromantik 2 (1991) was confiscated by Munich police twelve days after it opened, so a German film about loving a corpse became contraband in the country that made it.

Cannibal Holocaust collected the whole set

If you want a single film that ran the full gauntlet, it is Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust, and its Italian trouble is documented in the cannibal-cycle piece here: arrested at home, briefly suspected of having murdered his own cast because the marketing had sworn the footage was real, made to produce the four actors alive in a courtroom. Set that aside and look only at the international afterlife. Britain put it on the nasties list and still will not pass it without cutting the animal killings. Australia refused it for decades. West Germany confiscated it. Cannibal Ferox, Umberto Lenzi's flatter follow-up, trailed it onto most of the same lists on reputation alone. One film tripped every regime this article describes. It had spent years marketing itself as the most banned film alive, and every board obliged.

The films sold the ban back

None of the three boards could do much about the oldest trick in the trade, which was to sell the prohibition itself. Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS earned most of its listings on one photograph of poster art, doing work the film inside could not. Faces of Death toured the world under a "Banned in 46 Countries" line its own distributor invented, on the sound principle that a real ban was good and a bigger imaginary one was better. The Last House on the Left wrapped its outrage in the tagline "to avoid fainting, keep repeating, it is only a movie," and dared the audience to test it.

The machines aged worse than the pictures did. In 2016 a German court lifted the confiscation on The Evil Dead and the board struck it from the index after thirty-two years, and the country that had once filed Sam Raimi's first feature under criminal violence now sells it uncut at a rating of sixteen.