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AS 1982 ARRIVED, British newsagents carried only a few video-centric magazines - all of which were intended for mainstream consumption. Video was, after all, in its infancy: most magazines covered video *and* film, just to hedge their bets. Families would flick through these tomes, whether they wanted reviews of The Bitch, The Bogeyman or Bambi. Some were naturally shocked to see full-page adverts carrying the aforementioned Driller Killer sleeve image and another for Go Video's SS Experiment Camp. The latter design would reliably offend even today, depicting a virtually naked woman hung upside down with a metal swastika hanging from one wrist, while a huge Nazi commander's face looms over her.
Having run an SS Experiment Camp advert, Television and Video Retailer magazine quickly received a barrage of complaints. Protested Go Video's Des Dolan, "It's no use me toning down my own advertising, if no other distributor follows suit". Promotional tactics in those days ranged from the hilariously OTT to the downright dodgy. In the former category, you had the label World Of Video 2000 plugging their soon-to-be-banned title Nightmares In A Damaged Brain with a Guess The Weight Of A Human Brain contest… using real bottled grey matter. In the latter, you had Vision On promoting their output with the words Perversion, Sex, Eroticism, Human Carnage and - wait for it - Rape. One obscure Intervision comedy title, Tunnel Vision, bore the cover legend, 'If you want to increase the murder rate by 35% look at the back of this pack'. Questions were inevitably asked in Parliament, following media-led outcries as well as pressure from moralistic warhorse Mary Whitehouse and her National Viewers and Listeners Association. "I had a debate with Mary," recalls Vipco's Mike Lee. "She was having a go at our title Zombie Flesh Eaters, which she'd never seen, but nevertheless believed that the content would corrupt people. I pointed out that zombies were a figment of the imagination, and even so, they moved extremely slowly. It was ridiculous to think that members of the British public were about to start walking down the street at a snail's pace, biting people's heads off!" 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 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!'. Ridiculous or not, Scotland Yard's Peter Kruger warned that ultra-violent movies might soon fall foul of the Obscene Publications Act, which could prosecute material "with a tendency to deprave and corrupt". The Act had hitherto dealt with pornography, but Kruger told The Sunday Times, "The horror videos are a new concept and I think we are going to get involved with them more and more." 
He wasn't kidding. Before long, Kruger had delivered I Spit On Your Grave, SS Experiment Camp and Driller Killer to the Director of Public Prosecutions, asking whether they might be considered obscene. Many more titles were to follow. In a matter of months, the video industry's climate had changed altogether. Vipco's Mike Lee remembers wasting £20,000 on a full-page TV Times advert for Shogun Assassin, the cult blood-sprayer which has recently attained extra cool points as a Quentin Tarantino favourite. "Huge numbers of people clipped the coupon and sent the money in. Then the police came, raided us and took our stock. We had to refund everybody their money."Lee concedes that, at the very least, "The police were polite and businesslike. Superintendent Kruger had a chat with me and said they had a job to do. I said, 'Come on, you can see we're not criminals here'. I gave them the run of the place and they took what they wanted in a couple of big lorries. Eventually I ended up in the Old Bailey's dock over Shogun Assassin, but the Crown dropped the charge. In the meantime, we'd lost all these customers. The police returned the stock, two years later." Few would have argued that extreme horror films should be viewed by small children. Yet, rather than introducing a crackdown on video rental to the under-aged - or stressing parental responsibility - Britain would choose to banish most problematic titles altogether. Over the next couple of years, one rare note of sanity came from Labour MP Austin Mitchell, who noted, "We are taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut". features menu | home © Copyright Slasherama 2002-present |