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. That image was reproduced in the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail, raised in Parliament, and 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, whose British distributor claimed it had been banned in 31 countries, a figure he appears to have invented and which the press repeated without checking.

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.

It fluctuated constantly. Titles were added and removed through 1983 and 1984, 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, and Stephen Woolley in particular, chose to fight the cases rather than plead guilty to save costs. They won a clear majority. The same film, on the same tape, was found obscene in one jurisdiction and cleared in the next.

Distributors without Palace's money pleaded guilty as a commercial decision, which put convictions on the record for films that might well have been acquitted. The final tally of 39 says as much about who could afford a defence as about what was on the tapes.

The one man who went to prison

David Hamilton Grant distributed Nightmares in a Damaged Brain. He submitted a cut version and shipped a longer one, and was jailed for eighteen months for supplying an obscene article. That is the only custodial sentence the whole episode produced, and it was for the deception rather than the film.

The titles nobody can explain

The Funhouse is a Universal picture that played British cinemas with a certificate. Possession was an official Cannes selection for which Isabelle Adjani won best actress. 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 listed. 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. I Spit on Your Grave remains cut. Everything else on the list is either uncut or has not been resubmitted.

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