Banned horror movies and the certificate that was refused

Britain has never kept a register of banned horror movies; it has kept a record of works refused a certificate, and the difference decides everything about how long a title stays gone.

A refusal is not permanent and it is not national. It is one body declining to issue a piece of paper, on the standards of the year it was asked, and every famous British ban ended the same way: somebody asked again later and got a different answer.

Two refusals, two effects

The British Board of Film Classification has always had two customers, and refusing each of them means something different. Refuse a cinema certificate and the distributor can walk the print round to individual councils, because local authorities licence cinemas and can issue a category of their own. Refuse a video certificate and the film leaves the shops, because section 9 of the Video Recordings Act 1984 makes supplying a recording of an unclassified work an offence carrying up to two years in prison on indictment.

That is why the video refusals of the late 1980s emptied shelves nationwide while the cinema refusals of the 1970s did not stop anyone seeing the film in London.

1975

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) was refused a certificate on 14 March 1975. The reasoning was that the film could not be cut into anything acceptable: the terror is in the tone and the sustained sound of a woman screaming, and there are few discrete moments of gore to remove. James Ferman, who inherited the file that summer, reviewed it at least twice through the late 1970s, examined the killing of Pam and the attempted killing of Sally, and reached his predecessor's conclusion. He called the film the pornography of terror.

The Greater London Council then passed it X without cuts, in a print that was accidentally 28 seconds short. Other councils passed it. Others banned it. So through the second half of the 1970s the same film was legal in one town and unavailable in the next, which is what a national ban is supposed to prevent and what a refusal by the Board never did. It was passed 18 uncut for cinema on 19 March 1999, after playing on a local Camden certificate at a cinema five minutes from the Board's own offices.

Eleven years off the shelf

The Exorcist (1973) is the odd one out, because it was never refused anything at the cinema. It was passed X uncut in 1974 and reached video in 1981 on the strength of that certificate, back when a video release needed no separate approval.

The Video Recordings Act closed that route, and every title already on the shelves had to be classified or withdrawn. The Board declined to classify this one for the home. The worry was the age of the protagonist, the reports of hysteria in cinema audiences, and the fact that a video can be watched by anyone in the house at any age. It came off the shelves at the beginning of 1988 and stayed off for 11 years. The film kept playing in cinemas throughout, its X replaced by a cinema-only 18 in 1991, which left Britain in the position of allowing a film in public and refusing it in private.

The panel that overturned it

Straw Dogs (1971) was rejected on video in March 1999, in an American edit that had removed part of the second rape and, in doing so, made the first one read worse. A second distributor submitted the uncut version. That was rejected too.

Three years later the Board settled it with evidence rather than instinct. It showed the uncut film to clinical psychologists who work with sex offenders, and to a focus group of 26 members of the public. Twenty of the 26 accepted 18 uncut. Five wanted minor cuts. One wanted it rejected. The psychologists reported that the scene was not likely to encourage an interest in rape, and that Amy's flashbacks later in the film undercut any reading in which she welcomed the attack. It was classified 18 uncut in 2002 and has been available ever since.

Cutting instead of banning

The modern answer is almost never a refusal. I Spit on Your Grave (1978), the most prosecuted title of the video nasties years, was passed 18 in 2001 with seven minutes and two seconds removed. In 2010 the Board looked again, decided the 2001 cuts had taken out the horror of the rapes along with the nudity, restored some of it and settled on two minutes 54 seconds. Uncut versions were submitted in 2020 and again in 2022. Both times the 2010 cuts were upheld.

So the film sits in the only category that behaves like a real ban in Britain today: available, legally, in a version its director did not make, with the missing material still unclassifiable after four decades.

Where the list lives

A reader looking for banned horror movies is usually looking for two different things at once. One is the historical roll of titles banned elsewhere or prosecuted here in the 1980s, which is fixed and checkable. The other is the set of films that cannot be bought whole in Britain now, which is much shorter than the reputation suggests and consists mostly of cuts measured in seconds. Nothing on either list is banned by a government. It is banned by a distributor deciding the cuts are not worth paying for, and by nobody asking again.