The ‘Video Nasties’ Were the Most British Moral Panic
Listen, when you declare independence from another country in open rebellion, you tend to hold onto some lingering animosity toward that country even centuries later. It’s called epigenetics, probably — look it up. It doesn’t help when the country in question has a hilarious lexicon that makes even terrible things sound adorable. In England, a sex offender is simply a “sex pest,” an enraged person is “doing their nut” and a film too violent or graphically sexual to be distributed was a “video nasty.”
That’s not to say America hasn’t had its share of dumb moral panics. There was that whole Salem witch thing, which wasn’t cool. When it comes to censorship, no one who was alive at the time will soon forget Tipper Gore arguing in front of the Senate that Prince is 2 filthy. But we just kind of called that “the sex and violence in music controversy of the ‘80s,” not “the cassette skuzzballs,” and very few movies and works of music have actually been banned in the U.S. That’s freedom, baby.
Meanwhile, in 1997, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) boasted that their guidelines on video violence are “the strictest in the world.” It all started in 1980, when the distributors of Cannibal Holocaust wrote to conservative activist Mary Whitehouse to complain about their own movie as a publicity stunt, which backfired in a hurry when Whitehouse went on a mouth-frothing public crusade that resulted in authorities taking a special interest in examining violent movies (or “video nasties,” which is what she called them and not a much tamer version of The Ring that just, like, gives you a cold) for possible obscenity violations. Yeah, you can be prosecuted for tastelessness there. To be fair, they were mostly concerned with unsimulated animal cruelty and “excessive violence toward women,” but America was all but founded on at least one of those things.
Don't Miss
As dozens of filmmakers racked up obscenity convictions, police actually staged raids on video stores and seized anything that seemed suspicious. One officer even seized a copy of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas based on the title alone and none of Dolly Parton’s cinematic charm. Authorities eventually provided them with a comprehensive list of films prosecuted or under investigation, but they also gave them lists of films the BBFC had refused to classify without cuts and others they just kind of found icky, which included The Evil Dead, Friday the 13th and Scanners. You know, all the good ones.
By the 2000s, however, after one of their biggest fuddy-duddies left the BBFC, they kind of looked around and realized public opinion toward censorship had changed. For the next decade, the board began quietly letting previously banned movies through the line with minimal or no cuts, but the U.K. government also passed a law against “extreme pornography” that made possession of screenshots from some movies like Hostel II potentially illegal, even though the movie itself was not, having passed BBFC inspections.
After all, what’s more British than a compromise that pleases nobody?
