The "Video Nasties" Part 1: May 1982

(NOTE: for the sake of simplicty, all titles cited are those under which the film was released on video in the UK)

In the early 1980s, being young in Britain was fraught with difficulties - soaring unemployment, inner city riots, going to war over the Falkland Islands. But is 1982, something new reared its ugly head. Many of us were basking in the new-found technological heaven offered by the first full blooming of the video era, catching up on films that we'd only ever dreamed of seeing and even a good many titles that we'd simply never heard of. But all that was about to change when, in the space of just a couple of years, it became possible to be fined or even imprisoned simply for possessing horror films on video tape. The "video nasties" were coming.

We should, at the very outset, recognise that the term "video nasty" was rarely recognised by the majority of hardcore horror fans in Britain - it was, at the time, seen as a term of derision invented by a largely right-wing press to promulgate its own political agenda and its use was actively discouraged by many fans. It would later become a useful advertising slogan for video labels who, in the late 90s and early 00s took advantage of a relaxing of attitudes towards extreme horror and began releasing former residents of the "video nasties" list to the public, albeit often in cut form.

The problems began early in 1982. The video industry in Britain had enjoyed explosive growth throughout 1981 and as the new year dawned, there were already specialist magazines springing up dedicated to the new medium, both for the trade and the consumer. The trades were there to service an eager new breed of entrepreneur who were suddenly finding easy money in what appeared to be an entirely unregulated industry where the sky was the limit. It encouraged dozens of tiny labels to spring up buying in junk from all around the world as the public clamoured for whatever new titles they could get their hands on.

One of those companies was Go Video, a largely unknown label created by the enterprising Des Dolan, that managed to get its hands on two then unheard of and relatively recent low budget horror films from Italy - Lager SSadis katrat kommandantur (1978) (which it had acquired under its English language title SS Experiment Camp) and Ruggero Deodato's soon-to-be-notorious Cannibal Holocaust (1980)). Like all good distributors, they had to promote their product and it was the way that Go and some of its contemporaries were to bring the new material to the public that was to cause the first problems.

Go took out full page ads in the trades for SS Experiment Camp and Cannibal Holocaust, as did Vipco, who had recently landed Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer (1979) for UK release. All three of these titles came with highly contentious advertising imagery that landed both the distributors and the publishers of the trade ads in very hot water.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the regulatory body charged with overseeing adverts in print and other media, received a number of complaints about these three ads, particularly from readers of the January 1982 edition of Television and Video Retailer, which carried the SS Experiment Camp ad in all its lurid glory in the back page. The ASA upheld complaints against all three of the adverts, but singled out the one for SS Experiment Camp as being particularly objectionable.

The magazine itself printed several letters of complaint in its February issue, along with comments from Go Video's head Des Dolan who seemed unfazed by all the fuss, suggesting that the industry needed to impose guidelines on what was acceptable and what wasn't. The magazine agreed.

On 7 May 1982, The Daily Star became the first of the British daily newspapers to sniff blood and ran a story claiming that children were being exposed to "some of the most horrific and violent films ever made." It interviewed then Secretary of the BBFC, James Ferman, who was said to be "furious" that the video distributors had found a way to circumvent his Board's authority. The British Videogram Association, the trade organisation representing the fledgling British video distributors, was already starting to worry, a spokesman telling The Star that they hoped to draw up a voluntary code of conduct soon.

The first major salvo of the war of the "video nasties" was fired a few weeks later, on 23 May, by The Sunday Times whose journalist Peter Chippendale penned the sensationalist article How High Street Horror is Invading the Home. This was the first concerted effort by a Fleet Street journalist to identify and stigmatise the new brand of horror that was beginning to seep into British video shops. During the course of the article, Chippendale claimed that the videos (he identified the titles Driller Killer, SS Experiment Camp, Cannibal Terror, Cannibal Holocaust, Blood Feast and I Spit On Your Grave) were known in the trade as "nasties", a word that had first surfaced a few months earlier in a December 1981 piece in the Sunday People though at that time no-one was really paying any attention.

What made Chippendale's article so influential was that he took the time to track down some of the people behind the new batch of video distributors responsible for distributing these "nasties" for comment. Unfortunately, whether due to judicious editing or simple reckless bravado, the comments of Mike Behr, head of Astra Video (who were handling I Spit On Your Grave and Blood Feast) were deemed unnecessarily provocative in some quarters. Behr openly bragged how the video distributors were all but untouchable, that there was "no censorship law on video at all. What can they do about it?"

It amounted to the throwing down of a gauntlet, a challenge to the authorities that they were quick to pick up on. As Behr and many of his colleagues in the industry were to find out, the authorities could do an awful lot about it, none of it very pleasant.

Part 2 >>

Last Updated: 1 January, 2009