The video nasties panic, 1982 to 1984

The video nasties panic was not caused by films. It was caused by a licensing gap, and it closed the moment the gap did.

The gap

British cinema had been certificated since 1912. The BBFC was funded by the industry, local councils held the actual licensing power, and by the 1970s the system was settled enough that everyone knew where they stood.

Videotape arrived in the late 1970s with no equivalent. There was no statutory requirement to submit a tape to anybody. A distributor could import a print, transfer it, print sleeves and put it in a shop, and no certificate was involved at any stage. Films the BBFC had refused for cinemas were available uncut in a corner shop, at eye level, next to the sweets.

The market grew accordingly. By 1982 there were several thousand video shops in Britain, most of them recently converted from something else, stocked by distributors with no experience of the film trade and every incentive to buy cheap foreign horror.

The sleeves

What actually drove the campaign was artwork, not content.

The Driller Killer is the case that proves it. Abel Ferrara's film is a scrappy character study about a broke painter in New York with a landlord problem, and the drill sequences occupy a small fraction of it. Its sleeve was a close-up of a drill entering a forehead in colour. The distributor, Vipco, ran it as a full-page advertisement in film and video magazines, it drew a large number of complaints, and it became the emblem of the entire panic. The film behind it was almost incidental.

SS Experiment Camp went the same way on the strength of a poster. So did Cannibal Ferox, which was sold on the claim that it had been banned in 31 countries, a figure reference works describe as dubious.

The list

The Director of Public Prosecutions circulated a list of titles his office believed could be successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act 1959. It was not law. It had no statutory basis at all. It was advice to police forces about what was worth their time, and forces treated it as a shopping list.

The list was first made public in June 1983, revised as prosecutions failed or were dropped, and made obsolete when the Video Recordings Act 1984 came into force on 1 September 1985. Titles came and went along the way, which is why sources disagree about its length. The version that settled in the public record has 72 titles, of which 39 were successfully prosecuted.

A second list, under Section 3 of the same Act, ran to roughly 82 further titles. Section 3 allows a magistrate to order seizure and forfeiture without any prosecution at all: the police take the stock, a magistrate agrees it should be destroyed, and no defendant ever appears. For a distributor this was worse than the DPP list, because there was no trial to win.

Why the outcomes make no sense

Obscenity under the 1959 Act is a question of fact for a jury: whether the article tends to deprave and corrupt those likely to see it. There is no national standard, and juries in different towns reached different answers about identical tapes.

The Evil Dead is the demonstration. Palace Pictures, its distributor, lost a couple of early trials, then built a full defence. Retailers were acquitted over the film at Peterborough in January 1984 and at Leeds in May 1984, and in November 1984 the case against Palace itself was dismissed at Snaresbrook Crown Court. The judge in that case is reported to have said that some 40 cases had been tried with a full defence and only two had ended in conviction. The same film, on the same tape, was found obscene in one court and cleared in the next.

The final tally of 39 says as much about which courts a title happened to land in as about what was on the tapes.

The distributor that went to prison

In February 1984 executives of the British distributor of Nightmares in a Damaged Brain were arrested and charged over a version of the film that included 48 seconds of footage the BBFC had not approved. David Hamilton-Grant was sentenced to eighteen months, later reduced to six, and Malcolm Fancey to nine months. The case turned on the unapproved cut as much as on the film.

The titles nobody can explain

The Funhouse is a Universal picture that played British cinemas with a certificate. Possession was in competition at Cannes in 1981, where Isabelle Adjani won best actress for it and for Quartet. The Witch Who Came from the Sea is a quiet, sad film about incest and memory with almost no gore in it. Dead & Buried has a major studio cast and Stan Winston's effects.

All four were on the DPP list, in the group that was never successfully prosecuted. The most plausible explanation, and the one most people who have looked at the records land on, is that officers were working from titles and sleeves rather than viewings. Nobody watched 72 films.

How it ended

The Video Recordings Act 1984 required every commercial videogram to carry a BBFC certificate. That was what the campaign had wanted, and it worked: once every tape was classified there was nothing left to prosecute, and the DPP list became a historical document within a year.

The BBFC then spent two decades cutting horror on video considerably harder than it cut the same films for cinema, on the theory that a tape can be paused and rewound. That policy softened from the late 1990s, and most of the 72 are now available uncut in Britain.

What is left

Cannibal Holocaust remains cut, and will stay cut, because the animal killings are real and the BBFC does not pass genuine cruelty. Cannibal Ferox and Prisoner of the Cannibal God are cut for the same reason. I Spit on Your Grave is still cut. Love Camp 7 was refused a certificate in 2002 and again in 2020, and Gestapo's Last Orgy was refused in 2021. The House on the Edge of the Park, cut twice, was finally passed uncut in 2022. Most of the rest are uncut or have never been resubmitted.

The lasting effect was not on the films. It was that Britain acquired one of the strictest video censorship regimes in western Europe, and acquired it in a hurry, on the strength of some artwork.