Video nasty

A video nasty is a film that appeared on one specific list, compiled by the UK Director of Public Prosecutions between 1983 and 1985, of videos considered liable to prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act 1959.

This is the most misused term on this site and in most writing about horror. It is not a genre, a style, a country or a period. It describes a distribution history in one country. A film is a video nasty if it was on the list, and not if it was not, regardless of how unpleasant it is.

How Britain ended up here

The legal gap was simple and nobody had planned for it. Films shown in British cinemas were certified by the BBFC. Videotapes were not covered by that system at all, because when the relevant law was written there were no videotapes.

By 1981 there were around 400,000 VCRs in British homes, rental shops were opening in every high street, and distributors could put anything on a shelf next to the children's titles with no certificate and no age restriction. Some of them advertised in the trade press using the goriest imagery they had.

The panic

The campaign was driven by the Daily Mail, the Sunday Times and the campaigner Mary Whitehouse, who is generally credited with coining the phrase. A 1983 report claimed that a large share of British children had seen these films. Its methodology was later demolished, including by researchers who found children reporting they had seen titles that did not exist.

Parliament passed the Video Recordings Act 1984, requiring every commercial video release to carry a BBFC certificate. That is still the law, and it is why British discs are cut more often than American ones.

The list itself

The DPP list ran to 72 titles, revised repeatedly as cases succeeded or failed. Thirty-nine were successfully prosecuted. The remaining thirty-three were dropped, though shops had usually been raided by then.

It is an incoherent document:

• The Evil Dead and Possession are good films by any standard, and Possession is a serious European art film that appears to have been read entirely off its cover
• Cannibal Holocaust is a serious film containing real atrocity, and belongs in a different conversation than most of the list
• Don't Go in the Woods is barely a film
• The Big Boss, a Bruce Lee martial arts picture, was included and then removed

Several titles seem to have arrived because a police officer or a shop assistant objected to the packaging rather than the contents.

The afterlife

Being banned in Britain was the most effective marketing any of these films ever received. A large number of the titles on this site are remembered at all because a prosecutor read the box copy in 1983. Bootleg tapes circulated for twenty years at collector prices, and the reputations they built during that period are frequently better than the films.

Most were eventually passed uncut. The Evil Dead got an 18 certificate in 2001. Cannibal Holocaust remains cut in Britain over the animal killings, which is one of the few decisions in this whole episode that holds up.

Frequently confused

Films regularly described as video nasties that were not on the DPP list include The Toxic Avenger, Street Trash, Nekromantik and A Serbian Film. Most postdate the list entirely. If a film on this site carries the video nasty tag, it was on the list.

Where to start

Possession, to see how badly the list misjudged what it was banning.