Video Nasties

One Man's Meat is Another Man's Nasty

I went to film school as well as art school, perhaps making me twice the fool. It also makes me the type of person who enjoys books and videos about film, from the loftiest art to the lowest trash. It has only been in the last twenty years that exploitation and sexploitation cinema has been explored with any depth, and I've samples some of the books and documentaries. Along the way, I came across a very curious phrase; video nasties.

Video nasties? It sounds British, and it is; leave it to the Limeys to come up with a phrase that simultaneous cute and horrible. I soon learned that it was, I presumed, a nickname that English film fans gave to the more extreme end of the horror spectrum. Not my cup of tea most of the time, but it undoubtedly had social significance. It wasn't until a documentary came out in 2010 and made it across the Atlantic a few years later that the strange and twisted story of the video nasties entered my psyche.

There is a history of censorship, both in here and in Britain. During the 1930s, seemingly innocent films such as 'Dracula' and 'Frankenstein' were banned in England, the government afraid that their - by the standards of the day - horrific content would provide damaging shocks to the general public. Britain was a major market for Hollywood, especially after sound films make subtitles and dubbing an issue for the rest of Europe, and this ban was largely responsible for the ebb and flow of horror movies during the 1930s, as well as the adoption of the Breen Code by the movie industry in 1933.

This was a minor but not insignificant moment in film history, all but shutting down Universal in 1934 since horror films were their bread and butter. MGM, with films such as 'The Mask of Fu Manchu' and 'Island of Lost Souls' was actually producing more disturbing material, turned completely away, instead becoming The Studio With More Stars Than Heaven. It seems humorous today for anyone to think of Bela Lugosi's performance in 'Dracula' causing enough fright to provoke physical or psychological trauma, but the British censors did, and it affected the bottom line back in Los Angeles. Keep that in mind; decisions will have an impact later on.

My image of Britain was - incorrectly, it seems - a place more permissive in censorship that the USA. Hammer horror movies from the 1950s and 1960s upped the level of gore, along with a taste of T & A. 'Peeping Tom', the classic psychological horror film by Michael Powell in 1960, had one of the very first glimpse of nudity in modern film.

The 1960s seemed to be ridiculously permissive over the pond, with everything from Benny Hill and 'Carry On' films to the first full frontal nudity in 'Blow Up' and the casual nudity in Monty Python.

The early 1970s were problematic concerning English censorship; some films around 1971 did undergo some form of censorship, including 'A Clockwork Orange' by Stanley Kubrick and 'Straw Dogs' by Sam Peckinpah. True, 'A Clockwork Orange' was actually pulled from theaters in England by the director, not to reappear until his death. But Kubrick was reacting to headlines about young males copying the protagonists' actions. That's another fact to keep in mind as this story continues.

Both films concerned young underclass males going on a rampage and the violence that resulted. The censorship was more class oriented, as nearly everything is in England. Here in the States, pornography was starting to go in and out of the courtrooms during this time, eventually winning enough legal battles to be left alone. In Britain, the film industry collapsed and a flood of cheap European product, especially horror films, flooded the market.

So there were conflicting signals coming from Britain. Watching the first version of 'Video Nasties' provides some immediate history dating back to the Kubrick controversy. But the key technology behind the phenomenon was the video cassette, which has been making something of a comeback in the cultural landscape over the last decade. In the early 1980s, it was a dominating force of change. To put it simply, without the cassette there would be no nasty.

Video retail stores sprung up like mushrooms all across England during the 1980s, only to disappear just as quickly three decades later. Product was needed for the shelves, and retailers, especially independents, noticed that the cassettes that sold the best were the ones with the most extreme titles and images. Bad taste has always equaled good profits, whether in Britain or here in America. So independent distributors picked up on horror movies, often made by independent studios and young directors, and distributed them in independent video stores, sometimes called 'Mom & Pop' or 'Corner' operations to differentiate them from chains like Blockbuster.

During 'Video Nasties Part 1', the entire thing seems like a tempest in a teacup. A moral majority rises up, the mothers of Britain raise concerns, and politicians have the typical kneejerk reactions. We had a similar thing here in the States around the same time; imagine combining Mothers Against Drunk Driving with Tipper Gore's attempt to put warning stickers on music and you get the general idea. In England, it had been going on since the decade before. Deep Purple even wrote a song about it.

Mary Long was used instead of the name Mary Whitehouse; I imagine a lawyer may have been involved in that decision. Mrs., Whitehouse shows up all over the place, dripping moral outrage. It works, and the conservative press jump on it in cases very similar to the 'Clockwork Orange' scandal a decade before. This was mothers ganging up to save their babies from bad stuff, plain and simple.

Eventually Parliament got involved, as well as law enforcement. I'm no expert on English law, but a politician from any nation seems familiarly stupid. A list of 72 titles were drawn up for immediate removal from the rental shelves, with an additional Section 3 containing another 82 titles that were listed but not actively prosecuted. The first part of the documentary ends with the law ready to be enacted.

'Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide Part 1' is a very well researched documentary and can stand as the final word on the subject, combining period news clips with many interviews with experts and academics. As a narrative, it is complete while being very entertaining, as well as suitably lurid. Even better, there are two additional discs that contain trailers for every film on the Section 1 and 2 list, complete with a detailed on-camera discussion of the film and the reason why it was prosecuted. This helps fill in the details and makes the three DVD set a real value.

But it was part two, a similar three disc set, that sat me back on my heels. The second volume of 'Video Nasties' may not have the glamour of the first volume but it is a better documentary. After the first part, you might be wondering what all the fuss was about - especially if you are from America, as I am. In the second half there are clear descriptions of the consequences of the actions, including loss of liberty and property. This becomes a story of censorship gone amuck, including detailed career paths and the eventual collapse of the system for rating and banning video tapes.

That didn't happen in the States, at least not in the same way or to the same degree. We did have the Meese Commission that went after pornography in a similar fashion, but that was a niche market, a small and easily segregated ghetto. The porn industry lasted barely six months in England before being quashed; they liked innuendo but not explicit penetration. Anyway, you could take a ferry across the channel to France or Amsterdam and pick up anything you wanted.

There wasn't the curtained off room in the back of every Mom & Pop video rental store selling sex like in America, so the powers that be had to focus on some other menace to the youth of the nations. Videos games were barely invented and the internet was around the corner. Even rap music didn't have the clout to make it a worthy adversary. In the absence of all these other media, Mary Whitehouse and Margaret Thatcher joined forces and went after the lowest common denominator; horror film.

Yes, that's Chuckie going up in flames. It garnered the required headlines and got the necessary votes, eventually petering out after less than 20 years. Were the films that they banned really that bad? From a technical or artistic standpoint, for the most part they were trashy gore exploitation. I will avoid getting into the subject of taste and just say that in the majority of cases, all I ever need to see of these videos are the trailers. Were they worthy of censorship? Ah, there's the rub.

I totally against censorship, at least in theory. I've also been a parent, and like any parent have found myself in situations where I wanted to protect my child from inappropriate things. Case in point; many years ago, when my daughter was about five, she took dance classes at the local Arts Council. Walking in the entrance, one Saturday morning she asked me innocently, "Daddy, why does the man have something stuck up his butt?"

It was a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit, and it was very explicit. I was shocked and furious, and I wasn't the only one. There was a slight furor of concerned parents that lasted about one news cycle, and the picture was moved around the corner, still on display but only if you entered the exhibit space. You may call it censorship but I prefer common sense. The arts council knew very small children had to cross that lobby and they used bad judgement. It only took a small effort to satisfy everyone without draconian measures.

The United States is not any better when it comes to censorship; the difference is that ours comes at the board level of the multinational corporations. It's built into the system. The MPAA successful keeps independents to a minimum. If you have the money to make Marvel Studio or Star Wars level spectacles, you're in the club. If you depend on T & A or violence to sell you product, like most small companies or young directors, you have a steep hill to climb. Like Sisyphus, it is designed that you will never reach the top. I would refer anyone who wants to know more about censorship in modern America to the documentary 'The Celluloid Closet', and excellent study.

At six discs, with a three hour documentary in two parts that combines history, analysis and tongue-in-cheek humor, the Video Nasties series has the time to treat the subject with the proper depth. The 154 trailers and especially the story behind them, the reasoning for their inclusion on the various lists, gives the kind of background needed to make sense of the entire absurd mess while also being vastly entertaining. Many of the movies are very obscure, although a few are popular, and many don't deserve being called 'Nasties' at all. I have to admit finding many of the original videos beyond the pale (although I do own just less than half the movies listed).

The idea of anyone losing property, having business' seized, homes and apartments raided, people arrested and even sentenced to jail time and then being incarcerated is beyond belief; all of that happened and is outlined in detail in part 2. The politicians moved on, the laws were reversed with no fanfare after a couple of decades. Lawyers made out like bandits with people suing organizations on all sides. No direct evidence was ever brought forth to support the notion that any young minds were corrupted or any harm was ever done to anyone else by a single image from any video nasty. The entire incident, start to finish, was shameful.

It was no less than an effort by the British government to impose social engineering on the more independent elements of a new media distribution stream. That I did not understand the ramifications of these actions at the time, and it took thirty years to catch up with the importance of it all, is an oversight that I can only blame on myself. The movies are crap for the most part, but they still deserve freedom in the market, to succeed or fail on their own merits, not be forced off the shelves by governmental fiat. That this Orwellian series of events occurred in 1984 was an irony that seemed to be lost on everyone.