The Censor's Scissors: How Cuts Made Some Films More Notorious

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 13:00:00 +0000

For a quarter of a century it was almost impossible to legally watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in Britain. The British Board of Film Censors refused it a certificate in the 1970s; it drifted onto the fringes of the “video nasties” panic in the early 1980s; and it was not passed uncut for a UK release until 1999. And the entire time it was forbidden, its reputation grew. A generation of British horror fans knew the film intimately as a rumour — a thing so extreme the state would not let them see it — long before most of them saw a frame. When it finally arrived, uncut, many were surprised by how little on-screen gore it actually contains. The censors had spent twenty-five years advertising a bloodbath that the film had been too clever to shoot.

The Video Nasties Panic and What the BBFC Was Really Afraid Of

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Every moral panic needs a phrase, and the British one got a good one. “Video nasty” arrived in the tabloid press around 1982, a piece of alliterative shorthand that did the campaign’s work before a single argument had been made. It sounded like something a child would say, which was precisely the point — the word framed the whole subject as a matter of nursery hygiene. Within two years it had produced an Act of Parliament, a prosecution list, and a generation of horror fans who could recite forty-odd titles the way other people recite football squads. The strange thing, looking back, is how little the panic was actually about the films.

Bbfc - vo.rs

The Censor's Scissors: How Cuts Made Some Films More Notorious

The Video Nasties Panic and What the BBFC Was Really Afraid Of