VHS Nasty

On behalf of the motion picture industry,

welcome to the world of home video entertainment.

A video nasty is a colloquial term

used in the United Kingdom and Europe

to describe a number of films which are distributed

on VHS video in the early 1980s, which were heavily

criticized by the press, Parliament

and various religious organizations

for their content which contained

strong use of violence and graphic nudity.

No legislation was in place to regulate home video content.

This meant that any films on the market

and available for video rental stores had no certification.

Although the act did not govern home video at the time,

at this time the British Board of Film Censorship

was established in 1912 only governed theatrical

cinematic releases and was not

enforced to censor home video.

This is due to a loophole within

the film classification laws at the time.

Because of this, in the early 1980s,

the market was flooded with low budget horror films

featuring gore, violence and graphic nudity.

Due to the video nasty debate in both Parliament

and in the courts, this resulted in a number of films

being prosecuted in the early 80s

by the director of public prosecutions.

Following this, the government passed

the Video Recordings Act 1984,

which meant in Britain all video releases

had to appear before the BBFC.

The so-called video nasties caused

an outright media frenzy during the early 1980s.

To avoid fainting, keep repeating, it's...

Only a movie, only a movie, only a movie.

In 1982, Vidco placed an advertisement

for the Driller Killer in a VHS magazine.

This advertisement served to bring the awareness

of these types of films to the attention of the masses.

What happens next was...

Censorship, censorship.

Cannibalism.

Censorship.

I think it's important for us to define

what we're talking about here at the start.

This isn't the small type of censorship,

say an adult trying to restrict the access of a small child

to pornography, something you could argue

is in the best interest of someone who is not capable

of deciding for themselves what's best for them

or what is possibly bad for them.

This is something different.

This is something larger.

This is something insidious.

This is a small group of people,

a governing body of some type

restricting the access of the body,

of the masses to something that they want.

These are people who can decide for themselves

what's good for them or possibly bad for them,

but you have this overreaching governing agency

or government enforcing their own

ideals, morals on the masses.

This is where things get wrong.

And this is what we're talking about

when we talk about censorship within this context,

the video nasties, the PRMC, the Satanic Panic,

this whole era of restriction of music and film and art

in general from the masses.

So if you were lucky enough to own a video player

in the early 80s, you had unrestricted access

to a number of violent horror gore films

full of blood full of gore full of splinters going in eyes,

full of drills going in heads, full of nudity,

full of Nazis, full of everything.

The video nasties are bloody amazing.

They're very important for film, for film history.

I don't think there isn't a film maker

a horror film maker alive today

who doesn't owe a debt to a video nasty.

They were such a big part of our British culture

and worldwide, they're a worldwide phenomenon.

Even the word nasty, what does it mean?

At the time when that phrase was coined,

it was considered an incredibly nasty, vicious film

with a lot of violence, usually sexualized violence.

Women were the main target and victims in these films.

And certainly American films I even find distasteful

the early Wes Craven, Last House on the Left,

I Spit On Your Grave, for example another film from that genre

which seemed to revel in sexual violence

and it's something that I've never felt comfortable with.

But whether those films should be banned

or whether they should just have a warning on them

is a controversial subject.

Because if you talk about banning things

then you get into that area where

if you know Fahrenheit 451 essentially

is the temperature of which paper erupts into flame

and that was kind of exemplified as an example

in that great film of the same name.

Pretty much everything on this list is known for its brutality,

movies like House on the Edge of the Park.

It's got a lot of rape scenes,

but they're also very violent in nature.

The same thing with Last House on the Left.

I think that's sort of what in a lot of ways

what makes these videos video nasty,

it's just the nastiness of it all.

I know the actual New York repo

and they actually escorted that film out of the country

because they didn't want anyone even making bootleg copies

or any distributor getting hold of that film.

So the New York repo was actually escorted out the country,

which is really crazy.

But here's the problem censorship inevitably runs into

is that any time an art form, music, film whatever

is censored that inevitably creates an underground movement,

a collective of creative people that are inspired by

the restrictions that have been placed upon them

and seek to circumvent that

and find new ways, new forms of expression,

more extreme forms of expression

as a direct response to the unfairness of the censorship.

That whether it's hip hop, whether it's punk rock,

whether it's horror films,

that underground movement eventually

because of that extremity

because of the interest in the rebelliousness

of what they're trying to do

that outside group inevitably takes over the mainstream

down the road and becomes the mainstream.

The real hilarious thing about censorship

is if you think about things that have been

censored from The Wolf Man in 1931 to Friday the 13th

to Where the Wild Things Are it doesn't work.

I mean in the end over the long term,

censorship does not work, because eventually

these things you're trying suppress always

get out there, always.

That's the irony of censorship.

Censorship.

There should be no censorship in films whatsoever

except for children, protect the children, that's it.

It was a disaster to ban the movies in the 80s,

like Mother's Day, Toxic Avenger

because what you got a 40-minute version

of the Toxic Avenger.

It wasted people's money, it wasted their time

and wasted very good art.

There's no reason for any kind of censorship.

This is idiotic.

So it means that what we're in danger of

is throwing all of these films into a great conflagration

and destroying them forever

and then a very valid part of our movie history is lost.

So I think that's what the British government at the time

had in mind when the list of video nasties emerged,

where they decided that any film that had any kind

of graphic violence was considered beyond the taste

of the British taste makers and because of that

they decided that the public should not have access to them.

They became an illegal list whereby if you wanted them

and they still were available, you literally

had to get them in a brown paper bag under the counter

and take them home and bring them back in the same manner.

The story I heard is that they had a Go Video

once try to drum up some publicity for his film

so he sent a copy to Mary Whitehouse

pretending to be an angry member of the public

who had come across it in a video store

and he was hoping that she'd complain about it

and that would get people going out and buying it.

But instead it had a bit of a catastrophic effect

on the video industry as a whole at the time

because then it kickstarted

the whole Department of Public Prosecutions

raids and making a list and police raids.

So I think that was the kind of catalyst for the whole thing

but most of the time you would have video magazines

that would have full page ads

for stuff like The Dreaded Cutter, Essex Experiment Camp

and things like that and the video industry

didn't help themselves at the time.

But as you can see from the list of video nasties

a lot of the films are great Italian classics.

You're looking at Suspiria, one of the great art movies

of the late 20th century.

Looking at Tenebrae another really beautiful,

but extremely violent film, which also had humor

and some of the most dramatic camera movements

ever recorded in cinema history.

You had the films from Lucio Fulci,

which again are extremely violent zombie films,

but they're zombie films.

They're not to be taken that seriously.

Zombies are fantasy.

As we can see now in the 21st century,

one of the biggest shows on the planet

is The Walking Dead.