Glossary
Video nasty
A specific British legal category from 1983, not a synonym for a gory film.
A video nasty is a film that appeared on a list circulated by the UK Director of Public Prosecutions in 1983 and 1984, identifying titles his office believed could be successfully prosecuted for obscenity.
It is a legal and historical category with a fixed membership. It is not a description of content, and it is not a synonym for "extreme horror". A film made in 2019 cannot be a video nasty no matter what is in it.
The list was never law. It had no statutory basis and was advice to police forces about which prosecutions were likely to succeed. Forces used it as a shopping list for raids.
The commonly cited version has 72 titles, of which 39 were successfully prosecuted. A separate Section 3 list of roughly 82 further titles was liable to seizure but not to prosecution.
The panic ended with the Video Recordings Act 1984, which required BBFC certification for commercial video and made the prosecutions unnecessary.
Full data, including outcomes and current UK status: the list.
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