Review of Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape (2010) by Jean-Francois V — 08 Nov 2011

"Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape " is a partisan film that sets out to show that the furore over sleazy gore movies in the 1980s bioled down to dishonest, ill-informed and power-hungry Conservatives and Evangelicals trying to deprive a generation of youngsters from what everybody today considers good, clean fun, i.e. the repeated watching of mutilations, tortures and bloody deaths.

The film does document some irregularities in the case against video nasties. For instance, according to a statistic that was widely repeated in the media, 40% of Britain's six-year-olds had seen at least one of them. It turns out that out of a meager 47 respondents, 3 claimed to have seen a total of 17 such films, and that the figure was arrived at by dividing 47 by 17! Moreover, an independent researcher later showed that about two-thirds of children would claim to have seen films that did not even exist.

Also embarrassing for the prosecutors, they mistakenly believed that some of the films were actually snuff, i.e. involved real deaths. Actually, if animals were indeed abused for some of these films (which used real entrails and blood), virtually all of the scenes involved (sometimes laughably bad) special effects. What the makers of the documentary failed to admit, though, was that the series "Faces of Death" did include actual human and animal deaths and mutilations, though none of those had been perpetrated by the filmmakers themselves, who merely recycled stock clips.

Though those criticisms are valid, the documentary is heavily slanted against the repressive position. Before the screening on the Horror Channel, both the director and the producer laughed heartily after using the phrase "moral corruption", which somehow seemed silly to them, and warned viewers that they would be morally corrupted by the documentary itself, because it includes many of the most outrageous scenes from the banned movies (including a montage of the whole list to the sound of hard rock "music".).

Some of the arguments against censorship were very weak. At one point, the most articulate defender of the genre recalls a policeman blaming a pony murder spree on "video nasties of the full moon", which allegedly showed that the phenomenon had become a meaningless, all-purpose explanation. But that is a straw-man. Just because one policeman invoked video nasties in this way does not mean that the whole case against them is of that nature. Of course, at the time, little research was available since the phenomenon was entirely new. But several murders and acts of violence were allegedly traced to the influence of those films, and it would have been interesting to see how strong the case was.

Moreover, the film does not interview a single psychologist or psychiatrist, so that much of the argument is developed by horror movie makers and reviewers (all of them nostalgic about the era, though they have moved to stronger stuff, such as "A Serbian Film"), rather than experts on the causes of violence. My own readings (including especially a recent compilation of hundreds of studies on television by Michel Desmurgers) have convinced me that there is a strong case against modern visual media, irrespective of content, and all the more so when the content is either pornographic or extremely violent.

As a former fan of horror films, who managed to see only six of the original seventy-two listed video nasties (mostly because I already cared about artistic quality, and most of those films were appalingly mediocre), and a convert to a strongly traditional form of Catholicism, I have seen both sides of the issue. I can say that horror movies one the whole have been a bad influence on me, though of course even when one is the subject, it is hard to identify causal relations. I remember trying to imagine even more gory deaths than Argento had in "Suspiria", or getting in touch with very nasty fantasies under the influence of "Hellraiser". I believe the panic attacks I suffered later in my late twenties and early thirties were also partly attributable to the horrors I had watched as a teen. And I know personally a few people who have been much more involved in gore than I have and are personally very troubled (being medicated for psychological problems or having become substance abusers.) A friend of mine who told me "Hellraiser" had made her feel weird was institutionalised for three months within a year. This is all anecdotal, but worth investigating.

That we are now producing films that are much more horrid than the video nasties of the eighties, and that they are available to all through the Internet is also no argument. By the same logic, the gonzo pornography of today would exculpate the less extreme films of the seventies.

I wish a more balanced documentary had been produced, one which did not try deliberately to shock its audience with the goriest bits of the banned films, and which did draw on modern research on the influence of film violence on human beings, instead of turning into a paean to freedom of speech irrespective of social consequences.