Jon Holmes
I must have been about 12 or 13 when I saw my first disembowelling. One minute I was an offal virgin and the next a man with a leather face had chainsawed someone’s guts off right in front of my eyes. From that moment, like a fresh faced teen getting sliced by a curved spiked blade, I was hooked.
It was 1982 and I Know What I Did That Summer. Me and my friend Fat Kev spent it indoors with a toploading VHS Ferguson Videostar watching every single horror film we could lay our bloodsoaked adolescent hands on. This was a happy time when any clearly underage spotty kid could walk into any seedy video shop and take home an uncut Dutch print of Cannibal Holocaust or a nice splinter-in-the-eye-scene-intact version of Zombie Flesheaters and no-one would bat an eyelid. They’d be poked out, eaten, cut off and burnt oh yes, but certainly not batted.
We were in film heaven. Video rental was a new booming industry in Britain and no-one important had noticed that truly graphic horror movies were readily available for two pounds a night just next to the crisps in the Off Licence. Much to our delight we’d find sleazy Nazi Concentration Camp fun in SS Experiment Camp nestling up against the Salt and Vinegar, I Spit On Your Grave sitting proudly under the nuts (ironic when you remember what happened to the guy in the bathtub) while Luigi Batsella’s notorious The Beast In Heat had to make do with slightly obscuring the Twiglets. Our poor parents were, at this stage, oblivious to these goings on. In those heady days before the 1985 Video Recordings Act, video releases were uncensored and uncategorised. Film certification belonged to the cinema and anyway, the sort of things we were watching wouldn’t have got anywhere near the big screen in the first place. For cinematic thrills and spills we had Herbie Goes Bananas, but if you wanted Herbie to go Bananas with a power tool then it was to the video shop that you had to turn.
Until that is, a man called Graham Bright came along. Now he really pissed us off. By 1983 the tabloids had begun to spot what was going on near the snacks and had decided to be outraged about it. Tabloid journalism was, in the eighties, just becoming to come into it’s own and as Nigel Wingrove points out in his book ‘The Art of the Nasty’, the great video nasty scare was simply one of the first contemporary press frenzies, driven by the overriding demand that ‘something must be done’. It was The Daily Star’s fault. It reported that ‘the video boom is giving youngsters a chance to see some of the most horrific and violent films ever made’. Yes, thank you Daily Star. We’re 13 and we could have told you that. Excellent, praise be to the video boom. But thanks to the articles, stories and letters that began to pervade the press, the term ‘video nasty’ was dragged kicking and screaming into the public’s consciousness and demanded that somebody save our souls from low budget European horror. And that somebody was Graham Bright. ‘Our Graham’ was a Tory MP for Luton South and proposed the Video Recordings Act which came into force on 1st September 1985. Apart from ensuring certificates for all video films it also, more alarmingly, said that any films that were a bit icky would be seized by the police and video shop owners prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. A list of 34 icky films was then drawn up according to somebody’s whim, and one by one they began to disappear.
Now it was no coincidence of course that 1983 saw a General Election. That miserable old witch Thatcher had just bashed the Argie Scum in a row over some far off sheep and was keen to secure re-election for her party of blue rinse film haters. (Look, we were 13. Although my opinion of them hasn’t changed that much.) The Tories saw a welcome opportunity to curry public and tabloid favour and so Leon Brittan, Home Secretary, pushed the act forward via Mr Bright. “Rape of our Children’s Minds’ screeched the Daily Mail, displaying the customary amount of liberal journalism that has become it’s trademark. Then MP’s Jerry Hayes and David Mellor jumped on the bandwagon and derided the “immoral middle classes” who were allowing these films into their homes. Both then promptly shut up when they were involved in sex scandals a few years later.
By now the press were insisting that watching violent films can cause violence within people. They were right. When square old Brighty proposed his bill I wanted to nail him to the ground and put a drill to his lightweight political forehead. I loved these films in all of their knife wielding glory and he was spoiling my fun. I couldn’t get enough of madmen and monsters killing and eating people in strangely shot, underlit technicolor. School playtime became a competition to find out who’d seen the sickest film. Conversations were peppered with things like “ah, no, for me it’s Anthropophagous The Beast where the cannibal gets smashed in the stomach by a pick axe and then pulls out and eats his own entrails.” And we didn’t even know how to pronounce the word ‘Anthropophagous’. In fact, I’ve just discovered that I still don’t. But now, all of a sudden the man at the off-licence suddenly wouldn’t rent anything with a lurid cover to us any more in case he went to prison. This was like the end of our world. I was furious. This Bright man had ruined my young life. So, slowly but surely, I drew my plans against him.
And then I discovered girls and forgot about it. But, still the film buff, in my later years I tracked down every single one of those banned films – some off which I’d never seen – and collected them until I had them all on slightly dodgy VHS. A proud collection I think you’ll agree. And probably illegal. Fast forward about 10 years and you can more or less buy all of them on DVD in Blockbuster. Oh how times change. But hang on – how come if theses films were going to turn us into psychotic killers and slavering mentalists back then they won’t now? Simple answer – because they were never going to and now the tabloids have got other things to be self-righteous about.
So why not pop down to Blockbuster or HMV and get yourself a stack of nasties? Lucio Fulci’s excellent The House By The Cemetery is in the sale for £5.99 and Driller Killer doesn’t cost a lot more. And even Cannibal Holocaust is there, resplendent in all it’s innard chewing glory. Except it isn’t. If you look closely, you’ll see that it’s got 5’44” of cuts. Me though, I don’t care because I’ve got the uncut Dutch print and I particularly like the bit where…
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