Cannibal Holocaust and the fifteen seconds still banned

Cannibal Holocaust has never been banned in Britain; what stands against it is fifteen seconds of cuts to one scene of animal cruelty, and the law behind those cuts was written in 1937.

The film has carried an 18 certificate since 2001. The sexual violence that made it notorious is now passed in full, and the only material Britain will not license is footage of an animal dying slowly.

1982, and no court

Cannibal Holocaust (1979) was never sent to the British Board of Film Classification when it was made, presumably because no distributor thought it had a chance. It reached British video shops in 1982 in a version its distributors had already trimmed, carrying no certificate, at a moment when a video needed none.

The Director of Public Prosecutions then put it on his list of videos he believed obscene under the Obscene Publications Act 1959. That list is what people remember as the ban, and it never was one. A DPP listing is a prosecution shortlist, and prosecution could only start after release, by which point the copies were already in people's houses. The same problem attached to every title around it in the 1982 panic, from SS Experiment Camp through Snuff to The Driller Killer on the same shelves.

The 2001 file

The film was not formally submitted until 2001, twenty-two years after it was shot. Two things in it broke the Board's policy at the time. Its rape scenes ran into a rule that cut any portrayal eroticising or endorsing sexual assault, at any category. And the animal killings were real, staged for the camera, which is a different problem with a different statute behind it.

The distributor agreed to five minutes 44 seconds of cuts across both, and the film was passed 18.

The 1937 Act

Section 1 of the Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act 1937 makes it an offence to exhibit to the public, or supply for public exhibition, any film in which a scene was organised or directed so as to involve the cruel infliction of pain or terror on an animal, or the cruel goading of an animal to fury. The penalty on summary conviction is a fine at level 3 on the standard scale, or three months in prison, or both. The Act was written for the horse falls of the Western, and it is still the reason British discs of certain films run short.

The word doing the work is cruel. The test is cruelty and not killing, so documentary footage of cruelty is outside the Act, and so is a killing set up for the film if the death is quick. What gets cut under it, ordinarily, is a head-over-heels horse fall or a cock-fight arranged for the camera. The Board applies the same test to discs and streaming that the Act applies to cinemas.

The turtle and the coati

That distinction is what changed the film in 2011. The Board looked again at the four animal scenes cut in 2001 and found that three of them were quick. The notorious turtle sequence shows the neck cut with a single rapid blow that severs the spinal cord and kills the animal at once; the twitching afterwards is a post mortem reaction. Under the Act, that is lawful to show, and the Board had already permitted comparable kills in other films, Apocalypse Now among them.

One scene was not quick. A small mammal has its neck cut with a knife, the cut is protracted, and the animal struggles and screams while it bleeds out. Fifteen seconds. That is the whole of what Britain still refuses, and the Board said plainly that the 2001 decision to remove the other three had been driven by how disgusting they were and by the film's reputation rather than by the policy.

The rapes, reconsidered

The sexual violence went the other way in the same review. The scenes carry little detail of nudity, so there is little to eroticise; they are filmed chaotically, hand-held, with frequent cutaways to the faces of horrified onlookers. The Board concluded their effect is to horrify and disgust an audience rather than to endorse anything, and lifted the cuts. A film that had been trimmed for its rapes and its animals since 1982 came back carrying one animal cut and nothing else.

The same fifteen seconds were required again when the film was resubmitted in 2022, so the position has held through two full revisions of the Board's guidelines.

The disc you can buy

Anyone asking whether the film is banned is usually asking whether they can watch the version Ruggero Deodato made. In Britain, almost. The commercially available 18-rated disc is the complete film minus one killing, and the missing footage is the piece of it that the rest of cannibal horror copied hardest, Cannibal Ferox (1981) most of all. It is also the piece that no legal argument has ever been able to defend, because the Act does not ask whether the scene is justified. It asks whether the animal suffered on purpose, and here it did.