The Exorcist was banned on video in Britain by one censor

It never appeared on the DPP's list of seventy-two video nasties. It also could not be bought or rented anywhere in the United Kingdom, cut or uncut, for the better part of eleven years, because one man at the British Board of Film Classification would not sign off on it.

William Friedkin's The Exorcist passed the British Board of Film Censors uncut in 1974 and went into cinemas with an X certificate, the strongest rating then available. It played theatrically without incident. It was the tape that Britain could not have. From the late 1980s until 1999, The Exorcist had no legal video release in the country at all, a gap that outlasted the entire moral panic that is usually blamed for it.

The list it never joined

The video nasties were a specific legal category. From 1983 the Director of Public Prosecutions built a working list of titles considered likely to fall foul of the Obscene Publications Act 1959, films sold on unregulated pre-certificate tape during the brief window when nobody needed a classification to release a video in Britain. Seventy-two titles passed through that list at one time or another, and thirty-nine of them were successfully prosecuted: Cannibal Holocaust, The Driller Killer, SS Experiment Camp, low-budget horror and gore imports that tabloids and Mary Whitehouse's campaigning turned into a national scandal. The Exorcist was never on it. It was a major studio picture with an existing cinema certificate, and prosecutors were chasing a different kind of tape shop by shop with warrants.

Its absence from shelves came from somewhere else entirely.

Ferman's private veto

James Ferman ran the BBFC from 1975 to 1999 and treated video as a different medium from cinema, even for a film the Board had passed uncut for cinemas a year before he arrived. When The Exorcist came in for a video certificate under the new law, a majority of the examiners voted to grant one and Ferman overruled them. His concern was the home: the film's notoriety, he believed, would send underage viewers looking for the tape even with an 18 on the box. No court was involved. No prosecution was filed. The film simply had no certificate, and under the law that had just been passed, no certificate meant no legal sale or rental.

What the act actually enforced

The Video Recordings Act 1984 was Parliament's direct answer to the nasties panic. It required every video work sold or rented in Britain to carry a BBFC classification, enforced through trading standards with criminal penalties for retailers who stocked uncertified tapes. The Exorcist had been on British video since December 1981, in the unregulated years when almost anything could be released on cassette without a rating. Once distributors had to resubmit their back catalogues for classification or pull them from shelves, the film went in with everything else, and Ferman's office did not return it with a certificate. The tape did not need to be seized. The remaining UK copies were withdrawn in 1988.

The same censor, the same trick

The Exorcist had company. Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, passed X for cinemas in 1971, came out of the video shops in 1988 alongside it and Death Wish, because Ferman did not think it appropriate to classify for video at that time, and the Board's worry was a home audience replaying its rape scene out of context. Straw Dogs stayed off British video longer than The Exorcist did: refused twice in 1999, it was passed uncut in 2002 under a different director and went on sale on 1 July that year. The pattern was the same each time: a cinema certificate already on file, a director's office declining to extend it to tape, and a market that treated the film as banned even though no law used that word.

1999, and a different signature

Ferman left the BBFC at the start of 1999. Under his successor, Robin Duval, The Exorcist was resubmitted and passed uncut at 18 for video on 25 February 1999, twenty-five years after it first played British cinemas. The film that supposedly defined the moral panic of the early 1980s had, by the time it finally reached British shelves on tape, outlived both the panic and the man who kept it off them.