The video nasties list and the law behind it

Police officers raiding video shops from 1983 worked from the video nasties list, a document the Director of Public Prosecutions circulated to forces so they knew which tapes a court was likely to condemn. Seventy-two titles ended up on the version that survived as the DPP 72, exactly 39 of them were successfully prosecuted, and which way a case went turned on the town where the jury sat.

The licensing gap

Cinema exhibition was licensed and video retail was not. A film in a cinema had been classified before anybody sold a ticket, and a local authority that disagreed could lean on the licence. A tape sold or rented over a shop counter passed through nothing at all. Distributors worked that out quickly, and the sleeves worked hardest of all: airbrushed severed heads, drills, chainsaws, titles set in dripping red type.

By the time the Video Recordings Bill reached its second reading in the Commons on 11 November 1983, the debate put roughly 6,000 different video works in circulation. Graham Bright, the MP who moved the Bill, described the material at issue as “video recordings depicting unrestrained violence, sexual abuse, mutilation and murder”. The same debate heard that Nicholas Bingham, managing director of Thorn EMI, had been charged under the Obscene Publications Act over the distribution of The Burning (1981), a film with a Tom Savini burn effect and a studio behind it.

Deprave and corrupt

No film law was used. The seizures and the trials ran on section 1 of the Obscene Publications Act 1959, which makes an article obscene where its effect is “such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it”. That wording was written for books. It says nothing about gore, nothing about running time, and nothing about who is watching.

Section 4 of the same Act supplies the defence: publication justified as being for the public good on the ground that it is in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, widened for moving pictures to drama, opera, ballet or any other art, with expert opinion on a work's merits admissible either way. Crown Prosecution Service guidance sets the maximum sentence at five years imprisonment and an unlimited fine, and holds that the jury decides obscenity without expert evidence. So a defence expert could speak to a film's artistic merit, and the twelve people in the box decided depravity on their own.

The circular

The list was compiled the way a prosecution office compiles anything, from what it had in front of it. Complaints arrived, police seized stock, cases were tried, and titles were added or dropped as the results came back. It went out as guidance to forces who needed to know which sleeve was worth the paperwork. Nobody drew it up as a canon, and the horror titles that avoided it did so mostly by not being on a shelf a constable walked past.

Most of the enforcement never reached a jury at all. Section 3 of the Obscene Publications Act 1959 lets a justice of the peace issue a warrant on sworn information, and a constable enter “if need be by force”, seize what he believes to be obscene, and bring it before a magistrates court, which decides whether the articles “were obscene articles kept for publication for gain” and may order forfeiture. A shop could lose every tape in it without anyone being convicted of anything. That is why a second and longer roster circulated beside the famous one: titles taken under section 3 with no prosecution following. Around 82 of them moved through, the surviving records disagree with each other, and no dependable version of that section exists.

The jury lottery

Of the 72, exactly 39 were successfully prosecuted and 33 were not, and the split does not track anything a viewer would recognise as severity. The Evil Dead ended in the group of 33, with its distributor Palace Pictures losing a couple of early trials, then fighting the rest with a full defence; the case against Palace itself was dismissed at Snaresbrook Crown Court in November 1984. The difference between a conviction and an acquittal was mostly the town the jury sat in, because obscenity under the 1959 Act is a question of fact decided fresh in every trial. The same tape could be found obscene by one court and lawful by the next.

The prison sentences of the episode came from Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, after executives of its distributor released a cut carrying 48 seconds of footage the BBFC had never approved. David Hamilton-Grant was sentenced to eighteen months, later reduced to six, and Malcolm Fancey to nine months.

The Video Recordings Act

The panic ended when the gap closed. The Video Recordings Act 1984 received Royal Assent on 12 July 1984, and section 9 of the 1984 Act makes it an offence to supply or offer to supply a video recording of a work with no classification certificate. As amended since, it carries up to two years imprisonment on indictment, and up to six months or a fine on summary conviction. Suddenly the question at the shop counter was administrative. Either the tape carried a certificate or it did not.

On 3 November 1994 section 4A was inserted, requiring special regard to “any harm that may be caused to potential viewers or, through their behaviour, to society” in the way a work handles criminal behaviour, illegal drugs, violence, horrific incidents or human sexual activity.

Afterwards

Classification did what prosecution could not, and it did it quietly. A distributor submitted, took the cuts, and shipped. Titles came back to British shelves over the following decades in versions the trials had made famous, and the video nasties list turned into a collector's checklist of the sleeves a constable in 1983 was told to look for.

The exception is the one where the objection is physical. Cannibal Holocaust remains cut in the United Kingdom for one slow animal killing, held out under a 1937 statute that no 1984 jury verdict touched.