Video Nasties - vo.rs

The Video Nasties: Ten That Earned the Panic

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 13:00:00 +0000

For a few years at the start of the 1980s, the most dangerous object in a British home was a rented videocassette. Home video arrived faster than the law could follow, and a gap opened: films could be sold and rented on tape without passing the British Board of Film Censors, which only had authority over cinema exhibition. Distributors filled shop shelves with lurid horror, tabloid campaigners and the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association raised the alarm, and by 1984 the Video Recordings Act had handed the newly renamed BBFC power over every tape in the country. The Director of Public Prosecutions circulated a working list of titles liable to seizure, and the phrase “video nasty” entered the language.

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.