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TO UNDERSTAND WHY moral guardians became so incensed by a bunch of horror movies, it's worth looking at two factors. Firstly, this was nothing new. The Twentieth Century had regularly seen fictional works being taken to task by self-imposed moral guardians. In the '50s, pulp comics took a bashing from various corners, before novels such as Lady Chatterley's Lover and Last Exit To Brooklyn found themselves prime exhibits in ludicrous '60s court trials.
Secondly, the early '80s resembled the morning after a two-decade fun-binge. Britain had one hell of a hangover. Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party were in power and all was not well. "There was unemployment, crime and a load of riots," says Marc Morris. "What could they blame it on? The tabloids started reporting about video nasties influencing this and that crime, then someone in Parliament went, 'Ah! That's it. We'll blame it on that'. So they just picked up on it.""It wasn't a very nice time," agrees Harvey Fenton. "There was a political correctness coming through. In the '60s and '70s it was drop-your-knickers time with lots of drugs, but there was a rebellion against that during the Thatcher years. The video nasties uproar was a product of timing - these films came out when everybody was just a little bit more uptight." By Summer 1982, video distributors and dealers were being raided all over the country. Objectionable titles would be whisked away by often over-zealous police officers, leaving confused, fearful families to wait one or maybe two years for possible prosecution. The Director of Public Prosecutions accrued a list of nasties which had either been successfully prosecuted or were still awaiting trial. Initially, this list wasn't shared with shop owners, leading to further consternation. Any dealers found stocking certain titles were now liable to be raided. In fact, even dealers who didn't stock the officially blacklisted movies were in danger, as each individual constabulary made their own decisions and, inevitably, mistakes. Hence the confiscation of titles like The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, Lassie Come Home (!) and Apocalypse Now - the latter presumably having been confused with Cannibal Apocalypse. The horror… Reckons Marc Morris: "The most opportunistic police force at the time was the Manchester Constabulary. They were seizing stuff left right and centre, causing mass panic around the country. Even in the late '80s and early '90s, it was always the Manchester police on TV battling piracy, claiming that someone was selling snuff movies, accompanied by a clip from (Joe D'Amato's patently fictional) Anthropophagous The Beast!" Arguably, newspapers were most accountable for this madness. They spawned an endless stream of reports blaming video nasties for everything from bad dreams to homicide, backed up by the pronouncements of dubious 'experts' who were often quoted anonymously. Such stories generally lumped horror, snuff and porn movies together into one big, dangerous cauldron. They would deliberately set out to frighten Middle England, so that the papers could then be seen to right supposed wrongs with a Parliament-pressurising campaign. Politicians swarmed aboard the bandwagon and video regulation was quickly incorporated into the Conservative Party's pre-election manifesto. It was also tempting to see this as a class issue: the working classes now had access to dangerous new 'corrupting' technology and the upper classes felt threatened. The status quo had to be maintained. Unbelievably, Mary Whitehouse wasn't content with video companies merely losing money and stock: she was pushing for these people to lose their personal freedom under Section 2 of the Obscene Publications Act, which made provision for jail terms of up to three years. Her wish would finally be granted on February 3, 1984 when Nightmares In A Damaged Brain distributor David Hamilton Grant was sentenced to 18 months in prison. 
"That's genuinely insane," marvels Harvey Fenton. "It's a reflection of the way society was, back then. Who in their right mind could say that someone representing a straight-forward horror video, which was showing in cinemas, deserved to go to prison?"Would the nasties furore have happened, without those outlandish video sleeves and the insensitive advertising? "Those two factors undid the industry," asserts Fenton. "There's no doubt about that. If they had put these movies in more subtle packaging, then the nasties controversy mightn't have happened so quickly, but I'm not sure it wouldn't have happened at all." "It all came down to the content," offers Marc Morris. "The video covers may have drawn unwarranted attention to some of them, but it was ultimately the movies themselves. Kids would bring stuff home and shock their parents. Most parents - especially if they were politicians - hadn't been to the cinema since the '50s or '60s. It was like trying to get a judge to like Marilyn Manson nowadays. It was culture shock: they hadn't kept up with the times." Whoever had lit the fuse, Britain's video trade would have to live with the consequences. Not all horror fans, however, saw the era's purging process as an entirely bad state of affairs. "It was a bit of a shame, but to a collector it was a goldmine," admits Morris. "I realised this after going to my local shop in Southfields and asking if I could rent Nightmares In A Damaged Brain. The bloke said, 'No, it's been banned. But you can have it for a fiver'. I said, 'I'm not paying a fiver for that!' and he pointed out that it could be rare one day. So I bought it. Then a video magazine published the DPP list of banned movies which would change from month to month." This list, Morris points out, created "an overnight shopping list for collectors. If they hadn't have banned those films, they would have been dusted under the carpet and forgotten forever. Those titles don't deserve the notoriety they've achieved, but because they were banned, people want to see them. I spent a few days travelling around London, buying the nasties for three or five pounds each. I'd get them home, watch them and think, 'Why are they banned?'." Morris recalls that many dealers took the nasties home, through fear of a visit from the boys in blue. "I put an ad in Loot, around 1985, saying I was looking for Absurd and Blood Feast. I got a phone call from this guy who said he had them in his safe!" The Conservatives retained their place in power and the video witch-hunts pressed on. A draconian new law, in the shape of the 1984 Video Recordings Act, was swiftly drawn up and passed. In practice, it would mean that thousands of titles would vanish from circulation. Despite this erosion of the British public's freedom of choice, there was no outcry. The population were far more outraged by the new pound coin. "People didn't give a shit," says Morris. "They *still* don't. Britain is the most apathetic nation in Europe. It wasn't until the Poll Tax hit people's pockets that it got their goats up. Some films are still censored and most people are blissfully unaware. As far as they're concerned, what they don't know can't hurt them." features menu | home © Copyright Slasherama 2002-present |