After 20 years of outrage and hysteria, Severin takes a long look back at the Video Nasties panic.
Instead of seeing it as a cultural leap forward, a chance to see the films we love at our own convenience, as well as films from other times and other countries we’d never had a chance to see before, the birth of the home video market in the early ‘80s sent England into a spasm of fear, paranoia, witchhunts and rabid censorship that lasted nearly two decades.
When video stores began cropping up on quiet neighborhood street corners, it struck both the British Board of Film Censors and the media that films once only seen in theaters with sticky floors and broken seats (and my god what’s that stench?) before disappearing forever were now being thrust into the hands of the nation’s impressionable toddlers. The results would be inevitable and devastating, as sleazy low-budget numbers like Driller Killer and Faces of Death would spawn a generation of murderous, sex-crazed nihilistic hooligans who would kill everyone they saw. Something had to be done before it was too late.
Given the vagueness of England’s obscenity laws, police began raiding video stores willy nilly to seize all available copies of The Exorcist, anything with the word “cannibal” in the title, and in at least one case the Dolly Parton vehicle The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. At the same time, legal charges were being filed against the films’ producers and distributors. It was chaos, and no one knew what would be grabbed next, or why.
Finally in an effort to come up with a more coherent approach to what had been termed Video Nasties, in 1984 the government passed the Video Recordings Act, which set out sort-of clear guidelines for what films should be banned and what kind of prosecutions might be in order. The result was a fluid list of 72 titles, Video Nasties deemed unfit for human consumption. Most of the usual bugaboos made the cut, like I Spit on Your Grave, Last House on the Left, The Toolbox Murders, and Fulci’s Zombie, but the list also included several Dario Argento titles and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. Scanning the list it becomes clear the British government was waging war on low-budget independent genre filmmakers.
As these things happened the films on the list suddenly became very desirable, hot commodities in the video underground. Even as the media coverage of the threat posed by Video Nasties grew more shrill, the general public started making it clear they weren’t thrilled with all this crazy censorship. Still, it wouldn’t be until the late ‘90s before some of these laws were finally relaxed and the films in question (most of them anyway) became legal again. In the end, the age of the Video Nasties remains a terrifying and important period in terms of the freedom of expression, especially for those of us whose tastes tend to run counter to the mainstream.
On June 3rd, exploitation specialists Severin Films will release Video Nasties: The Ultimate Collection for the first time in the US. Originally released in the UK in 2011, the three-disc set includes Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape, the acclaimed documentary by Jake West and Mark Morris which recounts the whole complex and sordid history of the Video Nasties era, along with remastered trailers for all 72 banned films complete with commentaries by historians, critics, and the affected filmmakers.
For those who take their Video Nasties seriously (and I mean really, really seriously) and aren’t satisfied with mere trailers, on that same day Severin subsidiary Interface will also be releasing two complete Naziploitation doozies that made the list, the charmingly-titled Gestapo’s Last Orgy and Deported Women of the S.S., in uncut special editions. More exciting still, if you order all three through the Severin site, you will also receive a replica videotape of Gestapo’s Last Orgy for nostalgia’s sake, and a postcard of the video’s original artwork autographed by Jake West and Mark Morris. So, as they say, get ready to get your sleaze on.
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