Video Nasty July - Close To the Bone (a personal anecdote on the Video Nasty controversy)
we have a guest! Writer Matt Rogerson weighs in on growing up in the Video Nasty era.
Welcome back to Video Nasty July - in which this horror-through-the-lens-of-storytelling Substack will zoom in on the story of a peculiar era in UK video distribution.
I’ve mentioned before that I am very much looking at this era from an outside perspective, as I am not originally from the UK (but I have lived here for twelve years now). So when my friend Matt Rogerson (@bavalamp on Instagram) asked me if they could weigh in from the perspective of someone who grew up in the UK during the Video Nasty era, I couldn’t resist.
Please enjoy Matt’s reflections on growing up in Thatcherite Britain, with a grandmother on the local censorship board, and a father waging his own rebellion on the video nasties. Also, buy a copy of Matt’s upcoming book!
tumult
The early 1980s were tumultuous times in the United Kingdom. Life in what became known as “Thatcher’s Britain” was very difficult for lots of people for lots of reasons. On 2 January 1980, workers at British Steel Corporation went on a nationwide strike over pay, the first such strike since 1926. Thatcher’s response, rather than to get around the negotiating table with the Steel Trades Confederation, was to announce that state benefits to strikers would be cut by 50%.
Free schools were hit as the Education Act removed local education authorities’ obligations to provide school milk and meals, instead channeling money into subsidies for the fee-paying private school system. British Aerospace was privatized, a move that would be followed by the privatization of the nation’s railways and its water, electric and gas supplies, moves that are now looked back on as disasters for the country and its citizens. Later in the same decade, the Bank of England raised interest rates to 15%, prompting a massive crash in the housing market that imperiled those in lower income brackets and led to an increase in homelessness and social inequality.
A heroin epidemic spread across the north west of England, hitting urban areas like the one where I grew up hard (claiming several members of my family among its many victims, ruining their lives), as did regular National Front rallies, targeting people for extreme violence because of the colour of their skin. I remember a family friend being hospitalized by these racist thugs, beaten so badly that his face was permanently altered – not just scarred, actually misshapen, his nose and cheekbones badly broken and not terribly well reset, his teeth knocked out and a permanent bald patch on his crown where he had been kicked so hard his head split open.
Dumb things the Tories have said part 1039577070723
The 1980s were also a dark time for film censorship. The UK found itself in the grip of the Video Nasty scandal, when no fewer than 72 horror and exploitation films were subject to bans and their distributors prosecuted following a successful campaign by national busybody Mary Whitehouse and her group, the National Viewers and Listeners Association. The country’s right wing press asserted that teenagers were taking part in “torrid sex and violence sessions” thanks to these films, instead of watching Saturday morning cartoons and then going to weekend service at Church.
The campaign led to MP Graham Bright (who had suggested, on national television, that these films would not only corrupt children but pets too!) introducing a Private Member’s Bill that was passed into law as the Video Recordings Act (1984). Subsequently, many of the films branded obscene materials and recommended for bans and prosecutions (those decisions often made simply because of their titles, films like ‘The Evil Dead’, ‘Driller Killer’ and ‘A Bay of Blood’, banned and prosecuted without local authorities ever having seen their content) would not be passed for release until two decades later.
(in case you thought Matt was kidding - ed.)
Dark times indeed.
However, as a young child growing up in my home during the Video Nasty scandal, these were EXCITING TIMES.
a chin to remember
I was accidentally introduced to Video Nasties at the age of six when I awoke one night and, while my parents slept, I decided to sneak downstairs to watch the television. In the living room of our modest terraced house, my father had a bank of VHS VCRs stacked in an alcove by the television. They were big, clunky early models, linked to one another by a mess of thick cables and always operating, a loud whirring sound permeating the house at all hours of the day and night. What they were playing and/or recording was, until that night, always a mystery to me.
That first night that I crept downstairs, turned on the television and moved the dial to the video channel, I was treated to none other than Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, the 1981 slapstick horror that would go on to make young actor Bruce Campbell a household name among genre fans. I recall I was transfixed (despite my tender age and this supposedly obscene content) and I watched with awe as ghouls, possessions and buckets of blood flew across my television screen.
It would be years later that I came to understand the dynamics and importance of what was happening in my home (and family) at the time. I was raised Roman Catholic, with a large extended family, most of whom attended Church regularly, received the Sacraments and were generally God-fearing folk. My nana (my dad’s mother) was the family matriarch, and despite her softly spoken voice she ruled the family with an iron rod.
My father, who had lapsed in his faith, was nonetheless commanded to raise his children in the faith, have us attend Catholic schools and regular Church sessions and receive the Sacraments. My cousins all did the same, and their parents too. Nana was a core member of the congregation of our parish church. She attended virtually every Mass no matter the day of the week. She was not only close friends with the Priest but with the diocese Canon as well. She was on the church board, the school board…and the town’s board of censors. Yes, my nana was partly responsible for some of the bans and local prosecutions that the likes of The Evil Dead faced, and she took this responsibility very seriously.
defy
My dad, in an act of complete defiance, became a Video Nasty pirate. He would obtain VHS tapes of these films – surreptitiously ‘borrowing’ them when they came into the board of censors’ (i.e. my nana’s) possession – and then his bank of video recorders would go to work day and night, churning out copies that he would supply to the local community, handing them out for rental at a small charge via the local public house. His friends and neighbours would later return them and have lengthy, enthusiastic discussions with him about the latest illicit production doing the rounds: Joe D’Amato’s Anthropophagus, Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2, House by the Cemetery and City of the Living Dead, John Alan Schwartz’ Faces of Death , Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust and various others.
What none of them knew was that I had seen every film they were talking about before they had, as by this point I was making regular midnight trips downstairs to sit on the living room floor in my pajamas with my teddy bear and watch some of the most controversial, obscene films ever made. I already had favourites! I remember that the films of Lucio Fulci stood out to me because of their frequent moments of ocular horror, eyes being ripped from sockets or impaled on wooden splinters. They were gory, dreamlike and I noticed they also featured a lot of Catholic imagery. My education in horror began at this young age, and continued throughout my life. Fulci would become a lifelong favourite director of mine, as would Sam Raimi, Dario Argento, George A Romero and others. My fascination with the genre eventually led to a career (well, side-hustle) in writing about the magic of these films, the transgressive nature of them, and the complicated relationship between horror movies and the patriarchal institutions of State and Church.
Of course, all good things must come to an end and, eventually, my little trips downstairs to watch banned movies were discovered. That’s another story, a hilarious one in retrospect, and one that I detail in my forthcoming book The Vatican Versus Horror Movies, available for pre-order now from publisher McFarland & Company, Amazon, Google Books and all good booksellers. If you would like to hear the rest of my anecdote, and read about the horror genre’s long and antagonistic relationship with the Church (from Slashers to Zombies, Rape-Revenge to Cannibals, Nuns, Nazis and Knife-wielding maniacs), please consider buying a copy from one of the links below!
Matt Rogerson
https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/the-vatican-versus-horror-movies/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vatican-Versus-Horror-Movies/
My sincerest thanks to Matt for weighing in with this fascinating story - again, underlining just how fucking insane this era was, and how little rebellions like that of Matt’s father were what helped keep these movies alive in the public consciousness.
I was at the perfect age (and disposition) for this latest scare and my friends and I would scour Edinburgh video stores for these “ nasties” that we were told would scar us for life…
I Spit on Your Grave
Cannibal Xerox
SS Extermination Camp
Driller Killer
Were on the list but most importantly was the fabled “Snuff” movie, the one the video store owners kept in a plain brown paper bag under the counter, a move so horrendous, so vile , it couldn’t be displayed and could only be procured by sidling up to the counter and whispering to the shop clerk “ do you have anything under the counter?” Or words to that effect.
The indifferent negative nod only encouraging you to think there was and he was hiding it.
Strange times indeed, I remember travelling from Edinburgh to London with a couple of friends to see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as London was the only city showing this movie as councils up and down the UK had banned it.
( an aside and just as amusing was when Life of Brian was released. Again I had to travel to England to see this movie as it was banned in Scotland on its initial release)