Original subtitles

They were called Nazis, and they were Nazis.

And they were, in my opinion, evil.

To avoid moral panic, keep repeating.

They were only movies.

depraved and corrupt were the words that were used which set us on the road in

relation to video nasties. They were only movies.

If anyone gets sent to prison for releasing a horror movie, it's

They were only movies.

The Daily Mail decided that our children were all going to grow up as mass

murderers. They were only movies.

A time of moral panic.

These video nasties, as they were called,

To understand the whole video nasties phenomenon, you have to make a large

imaginative leap if you weren't alive in 1979, 1980.

Before video came along, it was either watching it on TV or hoping it popped up

at a local cinema club, because mainstream cinemas didn't really show

of stuff, or there was a Super 8 market where you could buy condensed... film,

so you'd probably get 20 minutes of a film, all the best things.

And again, we forget that. We live in an age of video on demand.

We live in an age of, you know, you can download a film in 20 seconds onto your

iPhone. All of a sudden, in 1979, domestic home video became a reality.

And I saved for about nearly two years to buy what looked like a sideboard,

literally, it was that big, and of course carrying those fucking...

massive machines that Jeff Capes would have trouble carrying.

Big slabs, like paving slabs with buttons on them.

There were three. I think there was the V2000, but no one had those. It was VHS

or Betamax, and we were told that the Betamax was the best. The war was

It was VHS or Betamax. If you're looking at video cassette recorders and you're

confused by all your choices, just look at the most important feature of all.

The picture.

i always remember being a little bit kind of bemused at the time that vhs was

the most successful since it was like the worst quality vhs which is a kind of

really low -end format anyway so the image that you end up seeing is this

of completely low -res grubby grainy crackly god knows what else scratchy

image we all kind of became used to not only watching movies but watching

second, third, fourth or fifth or whatever generation copy of the new

On VHS, you know, you really did notice the degradation once it had been copied.

That actually made it look more kind of offensive and scuzzy and disreputable.

And once they'd been played a few times on some really bad video players, the

scratches and the tracking and you're forever trying to retrack the thing

it was playing.

And it wouldn't quite work and you'd track it and, you know...

With horror movies, because the copies were so worn, because they were so

popular, because they were being hired by so many teenagers, there was snow on

the image. And because you can rewind and play again and rewind and play

kids used to just rewind and play again. So you'd know a really horrible bit was

coming because it would start to get a bit more snowy. That really helped to

disguise some bad effects.

and make it look better. The first copies I saw of the uncut Cannibal

and stuff, you know, you had the tracking out or they flicker into black

white. They held a real weird mystique about them. You think, wow, you know,

that's really dodgy. And I can understand why some people might think

In fact, a friend of mine once worked for the Sunday Sport as a photographer

he had some friends at the Sport who said oh do you know anyone with any

movies and he said yeah my mate's got one so he came round and we had a bit of

giggle about it he said look let's copy it down about 10 generations put the

tracking out and give it to them and see what they say and he took it into them

and they were hot pulls they said oh my god where did you get this from he goes

oh this guy I know let's shop him let's put him on the front page he said you

can't do that he's a friend of mine and besides you're idiots this isn't a real

snuff movie it lent this edge too those films that don't exist anymore.

As an example, I recently saw a very controversial film called a Serbian

And the problem with that is that it's beautifully made. The photography's top

notch, everything's crisp and clean. So no matter how appalling the subject

matter, you know it's a movie.

And you know that it's been faked.

And the effects are there to see.

And it takes away that kind of grubby, the nastiness that we had for those kind

of dodgy VHS films. Until the early 1960s, books were censored, for God's

And so they saw this new carrier arrive in which anything could go. There was

even a version of Private Eye called Private Spy.

I think you might find this very interesting.

Something else you won't see on your televisions.

We're from Private Spy, officer.

Which was part -funded by an ex -bank robber called John Buck Vicar.

Stories about corruption at Scotland Yard are now as common in their

as Patriot Girls.

There were lots and lots of creative people suddenly finding themselves with

means of reaching a public without having to go through a system of

It's reminiscent of pirate radio in the 60s, horror comics in the 50s. The

previous. Moral panic to which this was very similar was the Horror Comics Act

of 1955, which was rushed through Parliament because of hysteria about

these American horror comics that would turn our children into killers.

I first got involved almost entirely by accident.

I'd been researching, for other reasons entirely, a campaign that took place in

Britain in the 1950s against the horror comics.

Among the key sources for that was a man called Frederick Wortham.

He wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent, which came out in 1954.

Right at the beginning of 1983, David Holbrook, the literary critic, wrote an

article in the Sunday Times which he called Seduction of the Innocent. And

can imagine my eyebrows went up.

So I cut it out and thought, what is this? And he was talking about these

called video nasties.

His writing about the video nasties so much reminded me of what I was finding

out about the 1950s that I knew I had to go with it. I remember at the time of

the video nasties, around the same time, the young ones were on.

Oh, have we got a video?

Yes, we've got a video!

Wait a minute, where did you get it from?

The first time I ever heard of the term video nasty was when I watched the

episode of The Young Ones called Nasty.

Michael and I are going to indulge in an all -night orgy of sex and violence.

Not in the drawing room.

So you'd come in and you'd all be quoting The Young Ones to each other.

Happy viewing.

They wouldn't say that, I think, in what video, we've got.

They got a video recorder in and they had a whole pile of tapes.

We've actually been through that scene and Freeze flamed it and I think they've

got a copy of Nightmare Maker there, actually.

That's very buddhist, isn't it?

Yeah, they watch these video nasties and then it cuts to the damned thing in

video nasties, it's classic stuff.

They kept talking about video nasties. It's a video nasty!

And I thought, what does this word mean? What does this word mean? I think the

etymology actually started in paperback publishing in the 1970s. I think the

term nasties, as opposed to horror, was first used for people like Guy N. Smith

and James Herbert, you know, rats and crabs, those sort of thin, gruesome

novels of the 1970s. And I think that then migrated.

to movies because there was clearly a difference between the video nasty and

just a regular horror film video nasty was a term i think coined originally by

journalist i think it was peter chippendale in the sunday times but of

the term

Video nasty was rapidly taken up by Murray Whitehouse, rapidly taken up by

press, rapidly taken up by politicians.

One of the problems was convincing people what a video nasty was because a

of people portrayed me as someone who was going to ban Hammer horror movies,

which wasn't at all what it was about.

We're talking about scenes that are really horrific and leave nothing to the

imagination. Mutilations of bodies, cannibalism, gang rape. That is what a

nasty is.

In the last two years, thousands of video rental shops have sprung up all

the country.

One of the lovely things about the early days of video was that it was run on an

individual basis. The shops were not chained.

This was well before Blockbuster had got a toehold in this country.

Every garage, every sweet shop, every news agent, every sports shop, I mean,

anywhere, anywhere would have videos.

Revolver Video was a seedy little store up in the...

I don't know, you had to go up these kind of back stairs to get to it. It was

just a little room.

It was very much a working class thing, the video industry, back in those days.

They were just run by entrepreneurs, local business people, seen a bit of a

in the market, bought themselves a pile of tapes. It wasn't standardised, it

wasn't homogenised, it was just all individualistic.

A garage near us that we used to go and get petrol from, and we used to refer to

the guy, he was an Indian guy, and he just had this.

Mad! Look, massive mad beard and mad eyes.

So that was always known to us as Rasputin.

I knew a lot of the video dealers back in those days, and they were guys who,

you know, they might have been running a used car lot. They were the Arthur

Daly's of their time.

There are a lot of cowboys in video at the moment. It's sorting itself out.

Once it has, I think that it will just be normal.

I don't think I'd realised...

before I got the job at video business quite what the VHS revolution had done

to access to films in this country.

It wasn't like there were recognisable companies like, you know, Warners or

Universal on the labels.

There were these distributors that, you know, they were operating out of a

caravan in God knows where, you know.

Everything was so potentially seedy.

The companies that were buying the films half the time didn't even know what

they were buying.

Quality control.

went out the window, which sounds bad if you're worried about, you know,

quality. But from the point of view of somebody who loves trash movies as well,

thank God quality control went out the window because some insane movies came

that would never have got a release otherwise.

Nothing will prepare you for the horror of these butchers of the damned.

Because before that time, my experience of horror had been watching Hammer

movies. And suddenly you're looking at these titles that are on the shelves

of... Cannibal Ferox, Cannibal Apocalypse, A Spit on Your Grave,

Damaged Brain.

There's something about the box.

These were boxes.

That was the only way to market the film, was the cover of the box in the

So the covers became a kind of gory art form of their own right.

Certainly the titles of the works themselves are a catalogue of depravity.

Cannibal Holocaust, SS Experiment Camp.

I spit on your grave.

And I can vividly remember the cover for I Spit on Your Grave. And there was

something about the yellow of it with the sexy woman's art and the promise

of something the likes of which you would never before have witnessed.

This woman will soon cut, chop, break, and

burn five men beyond recognition.

And there isn't a jury in this country that will convict her. They always sort

of overhype the shock aspect of every sort of film on these sleeves.

One of the most notorious of them is Driller Killer.

Its cover advertises with relish that blood flows in rivers.

It carries a so -called warning that potential viewers will need tummocks of

steel. A man driven to the very edge and then beyond.

Drill a killer here on display in a video store. You can imagine that that's

going to be a magnet for police attention, isn't it? I highlight, of

drill a killer, which actually showed the drill just about to go into

brain. Now, that was on the front of the package.

The ones that really shocked me were, like, the death camp ones, of course,

because I'm Jewish.

You know, I found myself getting slightly outraged. All of that's fine,

know, all of those are all right, but this is where we clearly must draw the

line, everybody.

Tell me, do you find the spectacle exciting, private shorts?

Yes, of course.

Who wouldn't be excited?

And every...

newspaper that did a layout on Video Nasties would have the cover image of

Cannibal Holocaust, which is this grotesque vision of what a third world

cannibal looks like tucking into a double handful of guts to a great

the whole video nasty scandal was whipped up by the advertising methods

than by the the content of the films themselves and the video trade should

responsibility because they did it yeah their ads were always can you watch our

latest gruesome horror so the people who'd be seeing those adverts would be

dealers with shops and they would be looking proving in wow that looks good

know they obviously know their customers their customers are really coming in

going every week saying Oh, have you got anything really horrible? Have you got

anything more extreme, more gruesome? Which actually worked against them in

end because they were making claims for them that weren't necessarily borne out

by what was inside.

And did the ad people really not see where this was going to end?

It was that packaging of the material that was causing as much disgust in some

ways as what was in the material.

Eventually, after a couple of years of this kind of cover artwork, the BVA...

decided that they would put in place the Video Packaging Review Committee, VPRC.

The stream was there to tone the packaging down. It was for the sake of

industry as part of this drive, which certainly the BVA and the majors were in

favour of, of cleaning up the industry's appearance.

I thought it was a bit much, really, of the BVA asking us to sit on a committee

that's censoring their own sleeves.

All video.

had no classification whatsoever we were used to classifications in the cinema

but you didn't know what you're actually getting when you took a video home

there was no censorship effectively and many of these films that were cut and

banned were released intact the complete unexpurgated unedited uncensored

version and therefore you could have children seeing this material

It doesn't seem believable, yet every day this is what scores of Britain's

school children are up to.

They're tuning in in their thousands to the sickening violence of an endless

stream of video nasties.

What sort of age range is a few heard, or do you know of, children getting

access to these tapes?

What we're finding, it's between the 12 and 16 year age group.

Well, I was 12 years old at the time, so it wasn't entirely like, it was a

mixture of excitement and...

knowing the kind of stuff that we were going to watch, there was an element of

fear about it. I mean, that was kind of the whole point. It was that, you know,

you're doing something that, you know, my parents didn't know what I was doing

because it was round at my friend's house.

I think there was this kind of thrill of the forbidden.

Switch off your television set immediately unless you are prepared to

terrified. And it felt like it took real balls to watch.

You know, you'd absolutely, it was a badge of honour if you'd gone to school

said, have you seen...

amazing. Doesn't that scare you?

No, I don't have no nightmares or nothing.

But it is, it is like some kind of rites of passage to experience that, to go

through those films.

Don't go in the house.

But if you do, don't say we didn't warn you.

And we used to sit around watching these things with, often with cushions on our

head. And if you jumped and the cushion fell off, you were considered a geek.

And what makes me laugh about that is some of the horrendous things we were

watching on the screen, and yet we were still children enough to put things on

our heads.

My closest friends at the time were a little bit older than me, and it was

much their kind of appetite to go and watch the horror movies, so I kind of

along with them. And I think the first one that they showed me was Zombie Flesh

Eaters.

I remember I was terrified while I was watching it.

A

few

days later they said, we've got this other film, do you want to come around

watch it? And it was I Spit On Your Grave, which I think kind of, I don't

left me quite shattered.

Sweet, it's painful.

Oh, God.

Oh, my God.

I haven't seen it since, and it's kind of one of those things I don't want to

see again, not because it's appalling or anything like that, but because it

might ruin the effect that I remember it having on me at the time, which was,

yeah, I mean, it terrified me, it appalled me.

um and i think at that age as well you totally look past the idea that it's not

a very well -made film you come from an evil place you don't say here's a tip

from an evil new yorker i remember being in a video shop there was an old lady i

mean a real you know little old lady in front of me and she was saying i think

i'm gonna have a horror i'll take this one and picked up ice but in your grave

You just think, what a strange night he's going to have.

What a culture shock that's going to be.

Certainly for me, and for a huge audience, horror at the time became part

whole video.

party thing.

It's almost as though the video nasty has replaced the conjurer and the party

games at parties.

More and more we are getting complaints from the public who say their children

have been to a party and instead of it being the norm, they've been shown a

video nasty.

That is why you must try to understand the burden of parenthood. It would be

someone's birthday, you'd get a bottle of cider and you'd all go round to

someone's house.

Is this that we feel that we must let our parents know where we are?

Don't worry about that.

There was always an odd feeling with the video nasties, that when you actually

finally got to see them, on the whole, they didn't really deliver the goods.

I'd seen the back of a film called The Unhinged.

Unhinged.

The nightmare has begun.

And it was actually one of those really miserable films that was a bit like

Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer.

So I kind of killed the party by getting not a fun, not a kind of evil dead,

which is a kind of fun experience, but, you know, the unhinged, which I think

was a lot of dialogue.

I suppose you must be in a state of utter confusion as to what's going on

here. And at the end, just this brutal murder of these girls.

And all the girls are sort of like, oh, well done, Chris. Thanks for spoiling my

birthday.

Well, we knew that something was going to happen because the BVA very, very

belatedly thought that it might have a go at self -regulation and actually drew

up... A charter.

To propose a voluntary scheme whereby producers would be able to submit their

work to the BBFC for a cinema -style certificate.

Of course, the problem with those voluntary arrangements is not

going to play ball.

So, in other words, it would cost that distributor a lot of money to actually

follow through the code.

I have heard a figure of perhaps £500 a film to have it sent up for censorship.

certification i should say so although we did have some of the titles that were

on the video nasty list coming into the board titles like cannibal apocalypse

cannibal fear rocks the board did actually look at those videos in 1982

cuts and award certificates to them a film like cannibal ferox was withdrawn

then it was re -released in a heavily cut version and i remember

renting it to have another look at it. And I thought, what's happened to this?

It's been chopped to pieces.

You know, chopped about worse than the people in the movie itself.

The video industry and its outlets are trying to put their house in order.

Parliament is certain to do so if their voluntary controls fail.

But there were many other titles, like I spit on your grave.

that didn't come into the bbfc and gradually that came to the attention of

various interested bodies bodies like the festival of light ever since the

60s there have been a growing number of campaigners against what they saw as the

dangerous increase in permittedness and the lowering of standards in society

video nasties were a new battle in an old war what i hope all this debate will

do we'll put the pressure where it needs to go white house of course hadn't even

heard of video

before film distributor here, about to release Cannibal Holocaust, sent her a

copy of it.

Watch it, Alan. I'm shooting.

Oh, good Lord.

It's unbelievable.

It's horrible.

I can't understand the reason for such cruelty.

He was hoping that she would go out into the media to say this awful film.

um please nobody watch it and then he'd get a reaction when it was released but

of course it set off the whole the whole chain of events today people want

sensation the more you rape their senses the happier they are i feel mary was

doing mary whitehouse was doing a good job actually because she was bringing to

attention things that the general public just weren't aware of she could never

bring herself of course to

read or see anything that she ranted against. I have never seen a video

I wouldn't. I have far too much. How can you judge on a video nasty if you've

never seen one?

I actually don't need to see visually what I know is in that

film. You know, did you ever think of the Yakumo point of view, that we might

the ones who are savages?

Well, I never thought of it that way, but it's an interesting idea.

She just got on everyone's nerves.

In fact, she got on so many people's nerves.

David Sullivan launched a porno magazine named after her called White House. He

thought it was the ultimate have a go at her. Did anyone take Mary Whitehouse

seriously anyway? I mean, I certainly didn't. She had the backing of some very

important people. I mean, she was mates with Thatcher. I mean, this wasn't

somebody that you messed about with.

Mrs Thatcher and Mrs Whitehouse, both kind of pretty bourgeois moralists,

personified, absolutely made for each other.

Thatcher had been in power four years.

The tide was turning against her.

At the same time, the great campaign claims they'd made, that they were going

be the ones who were going to control crime, were coming apart at the seams.

There'd been the Toxteth riot.

There'd been the Brixton riot. There was a huge amount of unrest in society.

According to Maggie Thatcher, community no longer existed.

There was mass unemployment.

There was the violence of the Falklands War.

All these things were compounding.

and they needed something where they could stand as the moral stalwarts.

Margaret Thatcher didn't get dug into it, but she did tend to sort of take

Whitehouse's view rather more than the majority of people would. I would go and

discuss with Mary Whitehouse what we were going to do and how we were going

deal with it.

And of course she was very...

fortunate in that she had natural allies in censorious and right -wing

newspapers like um the daily mail um in particular

who've always been very strident on these on these matters and i'm glad they

because if they weren't I'm not sure which other paper would be.

Increasing public concern about the proliferation of these kinds of videos

been fueled by a powerful press campaign.

The most dramatic were the front page headlines on the Daily Mail and the

Express and so on, saying, you know, we must ban these things now. But the ones

that were the most symptomatic were, first of all, one that appeared on the

inside of the Daily Mail, which showed a television screen.

And leaning over the back is the figure of Satan.

And it was that figure of devilry, that figure of Satanism, of the fear of

something supernatural taking over. There was no need for them. They were

unnecessary.

And they were evil.

You know, you can actually use that word.

And that was nowhere better caught for me than in a tiny little report that

appeared in the Daily Mirror, which was entitled, Pony Maniac Strikes Again.

And it was a report on a really horrible attack on ponies in Dartford.

And the police report on it, at the end of this tiny little report, said, we're

not sure what caused it, but it could have been caused either by video nasties

or a new moon.

And you think, what's going on here?

It was that sense of this bizarre way video nasties could now explain every

in society.

They could explain riots, they could explain deviation, they could explain

abuse, they could explain rising crime, all kinds of crime.

Video nasties were a general purpose explanation of moral decline.

It wasn't an overreaction, far from it. And if these things have a harmful

influence on our society as a whole, then it needs to be, you know,

And I approached a magazine that had been going then called New Society.

It was a kind of social workerish magazine with political interest in

society going.

And I said, would they be interested in an article about the video nasties?

And they said, yeah, okay.

But they said, we do require you to talk about some of the films themselves.

And at that point, I'd only just got hold of my first couple.

So one of the ones I got hold of was I Spit on Your Grave.

So I wrote an article for them. And I really should have known better.

They set me up.

Because they published my article under the headline, How Nasty Are the Video

Nasties? Front page, big dramatic drawing.

You can imagine what happened.

My wife tells the story.

I was at work, she was at home, my work phone never stopped ringing, my home

telephone never stopped ringing, as just about every single television station,

radio station, national, regional and local newspaper rang up with insistent

stories saying, you can't be saying this, how dare you say something like

how could you possibly mean this?

And it got so bad that my wife took the phone off the hook and I eventually

persuaded the switchboard at work to take no further calls because I just

couldn't do any work. And this went on for three days, solid.

Because I was the only person willing to say anything outside the consensus.

And it would be true to say that the respectable papers, i .e. the Guardian,

saying because I was on it, didn't actually do much to counter this

because they had a kind of a non -conformist conscience which

was also shocked by these things a bit.

So those who were supposed to mount defense

didn't do their job.

And I can remember thinking at the time that the argument

for these films, or against having them censored, put it that way, was not put

properly. When it got that bad, I had a choice.

Either I could go down my rabbit hole and say, sorry, I didn't really mean

I'm really embarrassed about this.

Mum, dad, wife, children, didn't mean it.

Or I could do, which I'm more inclined to do, which is to say, all right, you

bastards, I'm going to see what's really going on here.

And to be honest, although it was really scary, and I don't want to understate

that, it was very frightening at times, I decided to carry on. All of this

panic, the moral panic and the sense of uncleanliness that surrounds the idea of

the video nasties, the idea of contagion, it's the same rhetoric that

-leaning newspapers use for just about everything that they take against, you

know, this notion of contagion, whether it's from immigration or from images,

you know, and it's all this...

It's all born of a kind of a British island mentality that thinks that you

somehow draw a line around your identity and then, having done that, you build a

walled community out of yourself and then you become incredibly paranoid

the walls being breached. Just fucking nonsense.

So it wasn't long before the director of public prosecutions began to get

involved and the director of public prosecutions wanted to see, really,

any of these films could be successfully prosecuted under the obscene...

Publications Act, which hitherto had only been used against sex, against

pornography. I led the campaign to bring films into the Obscene Publications Act

because it's a test of harm, of harmful influence, and the Obscene Publications

Act says that anything which has a tendency to deprave and corrupt, which

to make people morally bad in a serious way.

They only relate to violence, and it's violence for violence's sake that the

police are opposed to. And we went out.

and seized the videos from various companies.

In 1982, under the Obscene Publications Act, police seized 22 ,000 cassettes in

the metropolitan area alone.

These are the cassettes Driller, Killer and Death Trap, the first two of the so

-called video nasties to be withdrawn from distribution.

Created by Toby Hooper, maker of the screen sensation that Texas trains are

massive.

Death trap.

In court, a solicitor for the Director of Public Prosecutions called the

material an extravaganza of gory violence, capable of depraving and

those who watched it. Once we had secured a conviction on them, we would

them for destruction, an incinerator at Edmonton. I or my inspector would have

to go personally and certify that it had been burnt in front of us.

It was close to book burning, but with videos. I'm surprised there wasn't any

kind of video burning ceremonies going on.

Once it was then shown that the Obscene Publications Act did apply to violence,

then the DPP began compiling a list of films.

And this really became known as the kind of, you know, the Video Nasties List.

A list of titles.

that he felt were so obscene that they would be the kind of titles a jury might

find obscene in a court, Section 2 titles.

But also he had another secondary list of titles where he was perhaps not

confident that a jury would find against them, but where there was material in

the works that went beyond the normal accepted BBFC standard.

And for those titles, he added to a second list of so -called Section 3

Section 3 could be heard at the magistrate's court, but not Section 1

Section 2 of the Obscene Publications Act. In the case of Section 3 works,

would happen in practice is the police would see that a shop was stocking, for

example, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was one of the titles on the

supplementary list of less obscene titles.

And even though Texas Chainsaw Massacre wasn't a video nasty, it was almost the

poster boy for it, because what a brilliant name. The Texas Chainsaw

After you stop screaming, you'll start talking about it.

But that would mean that that film always had this tarnished image and this

of aura around it of being unacceptable.

The thing that the video nasties did...

was provide every horror fan who really wasn't probably into horror with a list

of must -see titles. We would have all the forces throughout the country

us up about the list.

And, of course, the list was only one developed through our relationship with

the Director of Public Prosecutions.

He wasn't too keen to make that list widely available, so...

Early versions of the list are marked with instructions not to publish this

list, this list should not be distributed under any circumstances.

It was all very cagey and in fact it took a while before the BBFC got hold of

copy of the video nasty list.

People often think wrongly that the BBFC must have played some hand in it in

advising the DPP what to put on the list. In fact that was not true at all.

We would go to the great big warehouses.

and take thousands and thousands and thousands of copies.

And of course, this was the problem. They would see hundreds of videos and

they'd have to watch them for one hour, two hours or three hours, however long

it was.

There's no short cutting on it at all.

So what happened was people would have their entire stock taken away. And then,

I mean, people said, well, just because it says on the label that this is Bambi.

There's no proof that it's not hardcore porn on the tape.

You've got to view the whole material, and that is time -consuming.

They'd get vastly paid for overtime, and they'd enjoy themselves no end, and it

was a lot cozier than going out and catching burglars.

And the police stations up and down the country in the early days of the

Thatcher era were full of coppers watching horror movies.

It such was, the hysteria, that they would...

They'd be out looking for anything that they could possibly bust under the

Obscene Publications Act because it was seen as an easy nick.

The classic example I think here would be the Samuel Fuller war film, The Big

Red One, which was thought to be some kind of pornographic movie.

The best story that I heard from that time was that they were going to see the

film called Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

Come on, right now.

Y 'all come back now, you hear?

Yeah!

We made mistakes because of the sheer volume that suddenly started

to arrive in the country.

I love all those stories of, you know...

apocalypse now, getting Satan off the shelves and they're just absolutely, you

know, the police having no idea what they're looking for. You know, complete

confusion. People had no idea what was on the banned list from one week to the

next. You know, a film on a list one week was taken off a week after and back

a week after that, depending on where it had been successfully prosecuted.

The retailers, for a long time, had no clear idea.

of what they could and could not safely stock.

But it's the everyday high street shop that we've got to look at. The police

have raided many video shops in the past months.

But I can absolutely just remember watching the news and realising that

the first time in my life that I'm part of something that actually now is

illegal. Because then when people started getting arrested, that's when it

started really getting worrisome.

Stephen Taylor was the first video dealer to be actually prosecuted under

Section 2 of the Act.

But it must have been a terrifying experience for a respectable,

businessman to be visited by a pawn squad.

And I'd rather be the first than the second.

The second might get a six -month prison sentence.

Because these films went before magistrates and judges and juries too,

cases, who knew next to nothing about films and nothing at all about modern

horror films, it wasn't particularly surprising that on many occasions,

not on all occasions, the films were found guilty. And that, of course, only

seemed to justify their place on the DPP's famous list. And I was looking at

news going...

I don't actually agree with that decision in the law.

And being someone who's old enough to suddenly at that moment where you go,

actually the police policy there is wrong.

Because I know that what I'm doing, I don't think is going to hurt me. And

you're a 13 -year -old, you obviously don't fully know. But you get a sense

actually we watch these films, we laugh about how gross they were. And mostly

those films are rubbish.

The DPP stepped up his campaign against the video analysis to take in not only

the retailers but also distributors of the film. And David Hamilton Grant was

tried at the Old Bailey under the Obscene Publications Act.

Prepare yourself for the most intensely shocking motion picture of our time.

Nightmares in a damaged brain. It wasn't a laugh.

a very good film and this is the problem with censorship test cases they're

never very good examples of the material listen

to me george it's only a dream and dreams can't hurt you

i had a great deal of difficulty getting film critics to

come and stand up uh for david hamilton grant for the censorship eventually i

twisted the arm of derek malcolm and it was really a very comic procedure i was

then the film critic of the guardian so they thought that was highly respectable

and in i went um man in the dirty mac almost but we had an incredibly hostile

judge i was on a hiding to nothing not only with the jury but also with the

judge and so when i asked Derek, put him in the witness box.

What would you say about the cinematographic merit of this film?

Which I said was a well -executed film.

And the judge exploded. He said, well -executed, well -executed. The German

invasion of Belgium was well -executed. That doesn't mean it's any good.

So it was quite clear to me that the judge would have instructed the jury

anyway. It just shows how far the tabloids have managed to sort of twist

and how the juries have been also coerced into believing what they were

in the press.

The distributor of this film, David Grant, got put in prison for releasing a

version that was actually slightly longer than the BBFC X -rated cut.

It was a surprise to everybody when somebody ended up going to jail over...

perhaps a different version of the film to the version the board had passed, but

nonetheless a film that had had a cinema classification.

David Hamilton Grant was the last person to be sent to jail for publishing, in

effect. He was the last victim of censorship in this country.

It's hard all these years later just to convey how infuriating.

And actually frightening it was. People weren't doing jail time this hard for

selling drugs.

And I think that was a surprise and a wake -up call to the industry.

And it was obviously just the case of the

establishment deciding that they were going to make an example of...

You know, a little guy.

But there were people working in larger companies releasing things like The

Burning. There was no way that the people who ran Thorny MI were going to

hold over the Coles for releasing a film that had been banned by the BBFC and

then sticking it out with the costumes intact anyway.

And they usually went after the little people, as is always the case in these

things. Stephen King, author of Carrie Said, Evil Dead, is the most ferociously

original horror film of the year. If you think he's kidding, see for yourself.

Despite having an X film certificate, winning numerous awards, and being the

most popular video of 1983, it was prosecuted earlier this year under the

Obscene Publications Act.

The Evil Dead guys, you know, Palace, were one of the very few people who did

defend themselves.

And I think they got picked on as a consequence.

My partner Nick really put himself on the line by testifying for the film. We

hired lawyers and we took it to court. We basically wanted for it to be tried

with a judge and jury.

We went to this strange court somewhere in East London for this death case. I

took one look at the jury and I saw...

We're going to win this. There are people in our history who have

called the bluff of those that George Orwell called the striped trousered ones

who rule.

The second -rate DPP lawyers and so forth.

And Nick did.

And like Felix Dennis and others, they are there.

Occasionally you get someone who says,

This is enough. I'm not going to put up with this. I'll risk prison.

Evil dead.

They got up on the wrong side of the grave.

Gradually, it fell into disrepute on the obscene publications front because a

jury in Newcastle would come up with a different verdict to a jury in

Southampton to a different verdict to a jury in West London.

And their lawyers were able to go back into the appeal court and get these

things struck out. The lesson of this story is you cannot put film censorship

into the hands of policemen and of the director of public prosecutions. It's

just insanity.

But by now, one has to say that Parliament became interested.

Parliament in the shape of people like Graham Bright.

A parliamentary colleague of mine, David Atkinson, was very friendly with Mary

Whitehouse, and she was out campaigning and wanted to visit constituencies, and

she actually visited Luton South.

But not all MPs have an idea for a bill, which is where the lobbyists, like Mrs

Whitehouse, come in.

And so I had a chat with her. She was very keen on this.

And I said to her that, you know, I was taking an interest. And she said, well,

I hope when you get back in again that you'll do something about it if you can.

So that was just...

an absolute chance that that happened. Mary Whitehouse, in particular, launched

a campaign against it. She created a compilation of the most violent scenes

the so -called video Nazis, which, of course, are taken out of context.

Mary Whitehouse held video screenings at fringe meetings during the Tory party

conference.

And so the lobbying campaign was to tell MPs that the public is concerned about

this matter, you've got to legislate, here's a bill, please support it.

Obviously the video industry was highly worried about it. I remember there were

pictures of me in video shops saying, this man is trying to stop you viewing

what you want.

I remember my brother telling me that he went in to get a video with his little

son.

who suddenly spotted this and said, look, it's Uncle Graham. And he was

keep quiet.

Because, you know, at the time, they were trying to make me look a villain.

And so Graham Bright said, yes, I'll introduce a bill, a private member's

if I get the opportunity.

You know, you can go through government, but then you have to wait upon

government. But a private member's bill can take the thing right through, always

assuming that you have the support in the House.

And surprise, surprise, I won number one place in the private member's bill.

You have a draw, and so whatever I had got a very good chance of getting

through.

And I had to decide what I wanted to do. Now, I've always been very keen on

protecting young people.

They had this thing where they were trying to protect children, but what

they trying to protect children from? They thought the whole generation were

going to become serial killers.

There's footage actually of the MP Graham Bright in the 1980s talking about

research that was being done into video nasties.

I believe that research is taking place and it will show that these films not

only affect young people but I believe they affect adults as well.

Now the statement is clearly barking if you will excuse the pun but of course

one of the problems again with what Bright is saying is that he's saying

current research being undertaken which... And it will show.

So essentially he's saying this research is still ongoing, but I know what the

outcome will be. That these films not only affect young people, but I believe

they affect dogs as well. That these video nasties will affect dogs and

detrimentally. There's also the point, of course, that this research wasn't

finished. A report was published under the title Video Violence and Children

from a group that called itself the Parliamentary Group Video Inquiry.

Now that title's important.

They were absolutely not a parliamentary group.

They did have one or two MPs. Tim Sainsbury, for example.

They did have a couple of Lords, but they had no official status at all.

However, calling themselves that, and indeed holding their meetings on

parliamentary premises on a number of occasions, meant that they came with the

imprimatur of being a parliamentary body.

Tonight, the parliamentary inquiry team said they were so worried about the

effects of videos like these...

The story of that is really quite extraordinary.

The PGV employed a man who worked at Oxford Polytechnic called Brian Brown,

was himself a Methodist minister.

And Brian Brown worked in a television research unit doing research on young

people and television and education.

And he agreed to do this research for them, but he was nervous because at the

meeting where they set it up, there were two conflicting points of view.

One point of view said, we need to get empirical evidence. Just how many?

How easy is it for them to get hold of it? What do their parents know about it?

Things like this.

Empirical evidence.

The other group wanted to assay the opinions of police, criminologists,

workers, moralists, to say, how dangerous are these?

Now, those two do not sit comfortably together.

The man who directed the project was a man called Clifford Hill. A lot of

children are seeing the video Nazis, the really obscene, violent films, at

birthday parties, in the homes of other children.

Clifford Hill increasingly overrode any research decisions.

And eventually, when Brian Brown challenged him on this, Clifford Hill

into the Oxford Research Unit, stole...

all the papers, the computer tapes, and made off with them, and then

retrospectively fired the Oxford research team without ever giving a

Oxford Polytechnic protested and got nowhere.

Now, when the report came out, what is very interesting is it made a whole

series of claims. One in particular made the headlines.

It said,

40 % of six -year -olds have been watching video narcissists. Wow, what a

headline! We never anticipated that it would reach 40 % of the figures being

seen by children.

This has shaken us.

And you can imagine what the phone calls to me said when I was confronted with

this. I had a long series of conversations with Brian Brown and I was

read all the documentation that survived because fortunately he kept backups of

a number of things.

And what emerged was... that the figures were entirely bogus. To ensure the

accuracy of their survey, more than 6 ,000 children and their parents were

interviewed, and at least two schools visited in every county across England

Wales. At the time that they had released this report, they had had just

47 replies to a questionnaire from six -year -olds.

Three of them said that they had seen some video nasties.

Between them, these three children said they had seen 17 films.

Divide 17 into 47 and you get nearly 40%. That is how they produced a

figure which was then front page on the Daily Mail and on most other newspapers

and was cited endlessly in the parliamentary debates. There you have...

All this research, and not only research, common sense.

Yet video nasties are so widely available that 45 % of children aged

to 16, that's 3 million children, have seen one or more of the banned films.

These figures are 100 % accurate.

It was fraudulent.

Cliff Hill's report, whether it's right or wrong, I don't really know, and I

don't particularly care.

We've been trying to get video nasties for a long time, and they're very, very

difficult to get hold of.

And so it seemed extremely unlikely that 40 % of children from the age of six

years old could have seen a video nasty.

And when we saw the questionnaires that were used by the parliamentary group

Video Inquiry, it became very obvious what was likely to have gone wrong with

the research.

And a researcher called Guy Cumberbatch did the very simple thing of going to

local schools in the Birmingham area and simply taking a list of films which

mixed together real titles.

with absolutely bogus ones.

We found that two -thirds of them claimed they'd seen films which never

What's the hospital of horror like?

It's a bit scary.

What sort of film is it?

It's got a lot of blood in it.

A lot of blood.

I can't say much about it, really. And what he found was that more than

two -thirds of children volunteer saying that they've seen films that don't

exist. I remember lying to my friends at primary school that I'd botched

quite a mass in the pit, which my parents wouldn't let me go anywhere near

I was about eight.

And it's exactly the same thing just happening in the 1980s, 30 years later.

And I'm not ashamed to say it. I said it at the time and waited for them to sue

me. They never did. I'll say it again now. It was fake.

But it was sufficient with the other things that they said in that report to

that thing unargued through the House of Commons.

Mary Whitehouse was obviously pleased that something was happening, but she

wanted me to go a lot further, and I wasn't prepared to go that far.

And I made it quite clear that, you know, we had to get a balance.

If you wanted legislation,

politics is the art of the possible, and if you go completely over the edge, you

won't get it.

And I stood my ground. So I wasn't influenced by anyone.

And so he'd already committed himself. He had to introduce a bill.

And so obviously we fed in as much information as we could. So I decided to

a look at it. I hadn't decided that's what I wanted to do. I decided to have a

look at video nasties. And the people at Scotland Yard had got

a lot of these things.

And I was horrified when I saw what we were talking about.

I made a compilation.

of what I considered was the material that I felt was likely to

deprave and corrupt.

And it was with that material that I showed it to Graham Bright.

Yeah, I did watch some of the nasties and they weren't silly, they were just

obscene. I think they were very dangerous.

There's an ultimate hypocrisy and irony here in that he's saying yes these

materials are absolutely capable of depraving and corrupting but oh yes

not going to deprave and corrupt me because I'm actually you know upper

middle class and I'm intellectual and I'm intelligent and I'm in a position of

power. Because really some of the things that we've seen are so horrific and

will I think tend to deprave not merely young people.

but other people as well.

Various MPs at the time assumed a real superiority to the masses.

Yes, and what's the difference, Mavis, for you reading about it in a book,

perhaps seeing a picture in a book, but actually seeing it happen on a screen?

Now, imagine that further still in your own home. There's a class element as

well, you know.

The moment articulate people step forward to defend the films...

They were shot down on the basis that, well, you're an intellectual, you're not

the kind of person we're worried about. We're worried about the

lumpenproletariat getting their hands on these films.

The people who are against this bill have got themselves all tied up with

academic approach to the word censorship.

My memory of those television programmes is how rude and impolite our opponents

were. Let's take an example of a case where she... One second, Mary.

How people are made fun of.

I beg your pardon? Will it help five -year -old children to see this?

It will help a lot of people learn... You want them to see this? What a silly

question. And this went on all the time that I was speaking.

Those of us who work with children every day can't have cartoons.

But I just remember thinking, you're so rude.

Yet you're supposed to represent good, well -mannered...

English middle -class behavior. What I find interesting is that we have

very patiently to the argument put by those who support the bill as soon as we

try to reply actually a great deal of heckling comes in because we actually

a more complex case to put. My hope was that through speaking out in a program

like that and speaking as calmly and as sanely as I was capable

Five percent of the audience might think hang on there is an issue beyond what

these other people are saying Ladies and gentlemen the bloodiest thing that ever

happened in front of a camera There

were

lots of stories about the way they were produced

some of them produced in South America.

Snuff, the film that could only be made in South America where life is cheap.

At the time, there were stories that, you know, people were actually murdered

for real on video, and I have no doubt, having watched shows through with people

at Scotland Yard and others, that...

That was exactly what was happening. They, of course, bought entirely into

notion that it showed a real person being murdered for entertainment

screen, which I think anybody who actually sat through to get to the

bit at the end realised it was laughably fake. It was people throwing sausage

meat around and trying not to laugh.

The people who put through the act believed that what they were seeing was

And that's more terrifying than anything that's in those films.

And then he asked if I would take it forward and we showed it in the House of

Commons. A title like Driller Killer, Cannibal Holocaust and I Spit on Your

Grave were among videos watched by MPs this afternoon.

And I said, so if you want to leave, please leave.

No one's going to think any worse of you because there was lots of shit.

sort of comments about who's bringing the ice creams around and things, you

know. And it started, and within three or four minutes, people were leaving.

What were the MPs' reactions to what you showed them?

I think they were horrified by what they saw.

You had members of Parliament being physically sick, having looked at them.

So in the House of Commons, we actually saw people eating live monkeys' brains.

Neither. top of the monkey's head being cut off and the brains being eaten

because that was all completely fine but i mean what were these people on i mean

they'd never seen a horror film since probably phantom of the opera the

version in 1942 so obviously the slightest amount of gore would sort of

them out and literally at the end of the showing the only people left were my

friends who wanted to support me but the interesting thing was around the

corridors the next day everybody said they'd been but it was a sort of sign

you actually seen them and of course you know nobody ever sees all the nastiest

bits of Nazis all in one go naturally

they were all disgusted and from then onward you know people knew what I was

doing and i had massive support right across the spectrum from all parties i

mean the prime minister made it quite clear yesterday that she was behind the

bill and that the government was behind the bill and that she wanted the bill to

pass through the house as rapidly as possible and this is taken from a

of the video recordings bill standing committee those who trade in this filth

are in the same class as peddlers of heroin and cocaine they are murderers

are destroying the physical and mental health of many young people, and they

bringing such people to degradation and premature death.

The bill, which is a private member's one, passed its second reading

and now seems certain to become law next year.

One of the things that I found very distressing about it, and which made me

angry about it as well, was that there was a kind of a cross -party consensus

about this as well. It wasn't just the Tories.

So you had nowhere to turn politically.

In fact, it's a great disappointment to me that there weren't some MPs who were

concerned with the implications for civil liberties.

These people who had no silly literacy at all, no feeling for genre, and

certainly had no feeling for civil liberties, were suddenly in a position

march into your life and spoil something which you'd only just started to enjoy.

They didn't care.

What they had wanted to do was win the argument to get what I called a flexi

panic law into the public domain.

With that behind them, they no longer cared because the police now had open

-ended powers to do a whole range of things to keep their views visible.

So from my point of view, it was a welcome piece of legislation.

And one of the key things I had to do was to get the British Board of Film

Censors. on the side because i wanted them to do it and what the act said is

that all videos essentially all entertainment videos have to be

by a designated authority and we were designated for that purpose the

board's change of name from the british board of film cancer to the british

board of film classification was meant to reflect

the feeling that the board's role should be more one of classification and

providing advice.

Of course, the irony is that the name change occurred exactly the same time

the video nasty scare had led to perhaps even stricter censorship

regulations. Free speech in this country has been very dependent on juries, the

jury that acquitted Lady Chatterley and so forth.

What the government did, of course, what the Thatcher government did, was to

abolish the jury. In the case of videos, you had to go to this

BBFC, the censors, and if they didn't agree, you had

an appeal to another board, but there was no jury trial. You couldn't get to a

jury. And so we became a country where sex and violence were

regulated.

By getting rid of some trashy horror films that, hey, never did really

too much harm, they also swept a whole load of other things into the same

shopping basket and regulated them, made it charged to regulate them at £1 ,000

a film, and made it very much more difficult for independent film

So I think it's one of the lesser -known aspects of the Video Recordings Act

consolidation, for which Reid kind of oligopolisation, domination by the

really. It was quite an achievement. I was still a fairly young MP in those

days. On the statute book, it's there. You can't take it away. It was my bill.

In a humorous postscript to this whole thing, it turned out last year that

somebody hadn't signed off on some extra -European...

and so the Video Recordings Act actually never was officially enforced.

Because the Video Recordings Act had never been laid before the European

Commission, in fact, it wasn't valid.

So this came as a bit of a surprise.

So if you're out there and you did jail time or you paid a fine or you lost all

your videos, they shouldn't have done it to you. There was a rather desperate

thing where the...

The Attorney General said when they were hurriedly trying to get the thing back

on the statute books that he didn't think that anybody who'd been prosecuted

would have a case for bringing countersuit and asking for their money

life and their videos back.

When the discovery was made, a new version of the Video Recordings Act

the Video Recordings Act 2010 was hostily put before the European

revoking the entire VRA and immediately... enacting it again in its

The whole point of the law is that everybody is supposed to abide by it.

includes the lawmakers.

If they didn't do their job properly, then they should be held to account.

In the short term, children may just suffer nightmares, but the long -term

effects are unknown as video nasties are a new social phenomenon.

A lot of the directors who are around now, it really did make an impression on

them. I'm heavily influenced by the video nasties. Up the stakes as far as,

know... blood and gut horror was concerned and i think that that has

me more than anything i think good taste and horror often need to be enemies of

each other to make good stuff the video nasty played a part in shaping the work

that i've done you know i look at the work that i've done with deron i look at

ghost stories i look at the way that i think about marketing the way that i

think about the impact that i want to have on an audience so much of that i

think i can root back to

The impact that those things have, they were pivotal moments in our career. They

helped us decide what we wanted to do. I wouldn't have written my books on it. I

wouldn't have had this collection.

I think a lot of journalists wouldn't have got into writing about horror

It was one of the first things that sort of got me into the business.

It had a profound effect on people's lives.

Positively, we can talk and write about them, but negatively, it ruined people's

lives. And that's the truly shameful thing, far more shameful than any

in these movies.

Why did we have to go through all that madness?

They're either out here legally or are ironically being remade as Hollywood

blockbusters now. You know, big -budget, glossy Hollywood remakes.

History has proven those films have become part of our popular culture.

In hindsight, I don't think the nasty scare was much to do with the content at

all. I think it's much more to do with control.

Well, you know, this thing persists to this day. I mean, I remember going on

to...

Sky News to talk about the James Bulger thing, when Child's Play 3 was being put

forward as a reason for the killing.

And on Sky News they said to me, you know, don't you think it's dreadful

kind of films are available on video? And I said, well, I don't know if you're

aware, but it was also showing on Sky Movies.

And that's pretty much when they cut me off at that point.

I think we're going to see a whole new set of censorship debates around

controlling technology.

I don't know that the genie could ever be put back in the box.

It takes two seconds on the internet to get access to material that the BBFC

would never consider.

I'm sure that 20 years from now we'll be looking back at now, looking at what

we're going, well that was an outrage.

And that was released on YouTube. Do you remember YouTube?

It was amazing, wasn't it? When you could watch anything before the law

But they banned the internet.

And I think the most interesting thing to me is just how little

historical memory we have.

The next time there's a panic, we won't remember just how stupid the last one

was and how people get away with things.

And that, to me, is the most important lesson about this campaign.

The evangelical got away with murder.

They got away with fraud.

They got away with deceiving people.

They now laugh it off. And the fact that almost all these films are now

available uncut in the public domain, they don't care.

Because they move on because what they want to do is to dominate the present.

And they don't care about history.

Critical voices have to care about history.

We have to care about the way in which things got controlled in the past,

because that's when the damage gets done.

And if we don't keep that historical memory, we will allow them to do it

next time.