Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Part I Censorious Rigmarole and Legalistic Overkill
- 1 A Nasty Story
- 2 Nastier Still
- 3 Two or Three Things I Know About ‘Video Nasties’
- Part II After the Deluge
- Part III Nineties Nightmares
- Part IV New Millennium, New Beginning?
- Appendix: The DPP List of ‘Video Nasties’
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - A Nasty Story
from Part I - Censorious Rigmarole and Legalistic Overkill
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Part I Censorious Rigmarole and Legalistic Overkill
- 1 A Nasty Story
- 2 Nastier Still
- 3 Two or Three Things I Know About ‘Video Nasties’
- Part II After the Deluge
- Part III Nineties Nightmares
- Part IV New Millennium, New Beginning?
- Appendix: The DPP List of ‘Video Nasties’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The video nasty affair began in 1981 with complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and the British Videogram Association (BVA, the video distributors' trade body) and members of the public about the gruesome nature of the advertising (cassette covers, posters in video shops, pages in video magazines) for certain cassettes. The ASA upheld complaints against advertisements for Cannibal Holocaust, Driller Killer and SS Experiment Camp, and the main video magazine editors agreed joint standards on advertising. It was these various forms of advertising, then, that first aroused the moralists' wrath, and so it could be argued with some justification that the video industry (or at least those sections of it eager for a quick profit at any price) was itself partly to blame for the moral panic soon to be whipped up by the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association (NVALA), the tabloid press, teachers, churchmen and others. Ironically, of course, in its early days that moral panic served to increase enormously the sales and rentals of video ‘nasties’ by bringing their existence to wide public attention and arousing curiosity in the uninitiated.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain , pp. 23 - 32Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011