The video nasty panic

By 1982 the video recorder had colonised the British living room faster than Whitehall had planned for. Britain took to home video earlier and harder than almost anywhere in Europe, and the rental shop, often a converted newsagent with a wire rack behind the counter, filled up with titles no cinema would have shown.

It filled up because nothing stopped it. The Obscene Publications Act 1959 policed print and, through a separate licensing system, the cinema. The British Board of Film Censors had vetted films for theatrical release since 1912. Neither had any statutory grip on a VHS cassette. A distributor could licence a lurid Italian gut-muncher, print a sleeve, and stand it on the shelf next to Jaws with no certificate, no cuts, and no law obviously broken. For about three years, home video was the one corner of British culture with no censor in it, and the small outfits filling the racks knew exactly what that was worth.

The cover that did it

The image usually blamed for starting the fire belongs to a film almost nobody had actually watched. Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer (1979) reached UK tape with a sleeve showing a power drill going into a man's forehead at close range, blood coming straight at the buyer, and Vipco ran it big in the video magazines. It is a grubby, cheap, oddly arty picture about a painter cracking up in downtown New York, and the drill barely features. None of that mattered. The cover was the product, and the cover was on a rack any ten-year-old could reach.

The phrase was everywhere by the middle of 1982. It came out of the popular press rather than any single writer, and the Sunday Times carried it to a mass audience in May with "How High Street Horror Is Invading the Home". The Daily Mail turned it into a running campaign, "Ban the sadist videos" and its variants, printed more or less continuously. Mary Whitehouse and her National Viewers' and Listeners' Association supplied the moral spine and an inexhaustible stock of quotable horror. The claim underneath it was that watching this material turned children and the weak-minded into copycats, a causal line asserted far more often than anyone bothered to demonstrate. By the end of the year the nasty was a fixed feature of the news cycle, a thing every parent in Britain had heard of and almost none had sat through.

The list

The prosecutions came under the old 1959 Act, tried in front of local juries, which produced the farce you would expect. The same film could be obscene in Manchester and perfectly legal in Leeds, depending on twelve strangers and the temper of a magistrate. To bring some order to it, the Director of Public Prosecutions drew up a list of titles his office considered likely to be found obscene and circulated it around the police forces. This is the famous DPP list, and it became the strangest artefact of the whole business.

It was never stable. Titles went on, dropped off after an acquittal, and shuffled between the "we will prosecute" column and a softer "liable to seizure" one. Across 1983 to 1985 roughly seventy-two films faced action, and the set that lost is the one collectors still call the final 39. Cannibal Holocaust (1980) was on it and stayed effectively banned. So were The Last House on the Left (1972), I Spit on Your Grave (1978), Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 (1979), which reached Britain as Zombie Flesh Eaters, The Burning (1981) with Tom Savini's shears work intact, and Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS (1975), which is precisely the sort of thing the campaign wanted a photograph of.

The stakes were not only forfeited stock. David Hamilton-Grant, who put out Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (1981) in a print the courts decided had been cut too lightly, was sentenced to prison for it, which concentrated the trade's mind considerably.

The list did not stay in the courtroom. Police used it as a shopping guide for raids, and because officers were working from a title and a reputation rather than a viewing, the seizures got stupid fast. Forces pulled tapes off shelves on the strength of a scary sleeve or a menacing word in the name, hoovering up plenty that had nothing to do with the case. A document meant to make prosecution consistent instead handed every constable in the country a horror wants-list and pointed him at the nearest rental shop.

The oddest casualty was The Evil Dead (1981). Sam Raimi's debut became the single most-prosecuted title on the list, dragged into court over and over, acquitted in one town and condemned in the next. It is now a beloved horror-comedy that turns up on film-studies reading lists. In 1983 it was Exhibit A.

The survey that fell apart

The campaign needed numbers, and in 1983 it got some. A body calling itself the Parliamentary Group Video Enquiry produced research claiming an enormous share of British children had already seen video nasties, the kind of figure that makes a front page and moves a bill. The psychologist Guy Cumberbatch went through the methodology. Some of the titles children were asked to tick were invented, films that had never existed, and a healthy number of kids dutifully reported having seen them. Once you know children will claim to have watched films nobody ever made, the rest of the survey stops being evidence of anything except how surveys go wrong.

It changed nothing. The number had already done its work in the papers.

The Act

The fix was the Video Recordings Act 1984, brought as a Private Member's Bill by the Conservative MP Graham Bright with the full weight of the Thatcher government behind it. It received Royal Assent on 12 July 1984. The mechanism was simple and total: every video work offered for sale or hire in Britain now had to carry a certificate from a designated authority, and that authority was the newly renamed British Board of Film Classification. Supply a tape with no certificate, or hand a certificated one to someone under the age on the label, and you had committed a criminal offence. The Board started grinding through the backlog in 1985. The unregulated shelf was gone.

What replaced it was heavier than the cinema regime had ever been. The BBFC under its director James Ferman treated tape as a special hazard, on the reasoning that a cassette can be paused, rewound, and left running for a child on a wet afternoon, so it cut harder for video than for the big screen. Titles disappeared for a generation. The Last House on the Left was not passed uncut in Britain until 2008. I Spit on Your Grave waited until 2010 for a fully uncut certificate. The Evil Dead did not reach tape uncut until 2001. Cannibal Holocaust is still cut in the UK over the animal killings, which is the one point where the censors and this site's own cannibal-cycle writer end up standing in the same place.

There is a fittingly British coda. In 2009 someone noticed that the 1984 Act had never been notified to the European Commission under a technical-standards directive when it was passed, a piece of Brussels paperwork nobody had filed. The upshot was that the law under which Britain had spent a quarter of a century prosecuting video was arguably unenforceable the whole time, and Parliament had to quietly pass a second Video Recordings Act in 2010 to re-enact the identical thing and paper over the gap. Twenty-five years of raids, and the founding document was void on a filing error.

What the panic built

The lasting effect was not the one anyone intended. Banning a film in a country with ferries to France is an advertising budget. The DPP list turned into a collector's checklist, the pre-certificate tapes became trophies changing hands for silly money, and a stack of ordinary regional horror pictures picked up a mystique they had done nothing on screen to earn. Half the final 39 are dull. The reputation of The Driller Killer still rests on a drill it barely uses.

The people who ran the campaign got their statute and their cuts, and every film on the list outlived both, mostly because the ban was the best trailer any of it ever had.