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THE FILTH AND THE FURYThe story of Britain's video nasty controversy...![[The classic sleeve of Vipco's original release for Abel Ferrera's The Driller Killer]](../images/nasties/drillerkiller.jpg)
"There is no video censorship law at all. What can they do about it?" - Mike Behr, MD of Astra Video, quoted in The Sunday Times dated May 23, 1982.IF YOU WERE TO COMPILE a book of Famous Last Words, the above quote would beg for inclusion. Mike Behr was speaking during the video boom, simultaneously a time of great innocence and lawless freedom. His distributing company Astra Video were enjoying Top 10 rental success with I Spit On Your Grave, a graphic rape-revenge flick. Among their planned releases was Snuff, a movie with publicity centring around the untrue notion that it depicted real murder. It would be released without onscreen credits, to compound the sense that actors were genuinely dying before viewers' very eyes. Surely, figured Astra, Snuff would go down a storm. There was indeed a storm brewing, but no-one foresaw the havoc it would wreak. In the meantime, the public happily filed into video rental stores and gazed at the growing range of movies on offer, thrilled by the new horizons which technology now offered them. Video Cassette Recorders had hit the UK in the mid-'70s and by the early '80s were no longer the stuff of a madman's dreams. While these battleship-esque machines cost around £600, you could always rent one for, say, £18 a month. Britain soon had more VCRs per household than anywhere else in the world. Televisual entertainment no longer had to stop when the National Anthem played. For horror fans, the joys of video were two-fold. Not only could they watch movies in the privacy of their own homes, and push 'freeze-frame' when somebody's head flew off (albeit a freeze-frame adorned with wavy lines, in those days), but these films had not been tampered with by the British Board Of Film Censors - a body set up in 1912 to regulate works shown in cinemas. Some video distributors chose to release prints which had been censored by the BBFC for theatrical release, but the Board had no direct say on what appeared on video and - crucially - what didn't. There was no certification system for this medium and no age restrictions on who could rent these new-fangled 'videograms'. Regardless of your feelings towards horror movies, some of the releases lined up on video shop shelves were guaranteed to not so much catch the eye, as impale it like a cocktail olive. Their oversized video boxes resembled tombstones, displaying the kind of sleeves destined to firmly establish the word 'lurid' in the horror enthusiast's vocabulary. On the photographic cover of The Driller Killer, a spinning metal bit bored its way into the skull of a screaming victim, his face splattered with gore. 'The blood runs in rivers,' shrieked the tag-line, 'and the drill keeps tearing through flesh and bone!'. Vipco was the distributor responsible for that sleeve. "I thought it was perfectly legitimate," reflects Mike Lee, guvnor at the company which still runs today. "It highlighted the horrific nature of the film. It's like going into a fairground: if you don't want to be sick, don't go on the rollercoaster. If you don't want to be scared shitless, don't get one of our horrors! When I bought The Driller Killer, we assumed the government didn't give a monkey's. We'd never heard of violence being pursued on home video. We knew hardcore porn was always vilified, but nobody said to us, 'Don't do horror films, they're bad news'." 
Harvey Fenton, the man behind top UK book publishers FAB Press, recalls tugging Snuff off a shelf at the age of 13. "I asked my mum if we could rent it," he says. "She looked deeply horrified. But she still rented me Zombie Flesh Eaters, The Exorcist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre."With hindsight, Fenton is able to rationalise why video distributors adorned their horror titles with such provocative covers. "Video wasn't really pioneered by the major studios," he says, "who still believed in the cinema and selling rights to TV. The trailblazing companies like Intervision weren't video companies as we now think of them, with an office in Wardour Street. They were run out of someone's garage, so they had to do whatever they could to compete in the marketplace. If they could afford to pay for film rights, then obviously it wouldn't be the blockbuster titles. So they'd search for the low-budget films. The best way to market those has always been great advertising, with great promotional artwork." It often worked. Yet the unfortunate by-product of distributors' attention-hijacking tactics was to incite the wrath of high-minded folk who had probably never seen a horror film, let alone the claret-heavy excesses of The Evil Dead or The Burning. Video's glorious naivety was about to earn itself an axe in the face. PAGE ONE | page two | page three | page four | page five features menu | home © Copyright Slasherama 2002-present |