Square

In 1984, a disparate group of horror films imported from the USA and Europe were banned in the United Kingdom. It is popularly believed that these so-called ‘video nasties’ were the product of Britain’s immoral and disreputable independent video industry and that – following a series of public complaints about the advertising being used to promote these films – a moral panic spontaneously erupted that resulted in the introduction of the Video Recordings Act in 1984. While neither of these statements is entirely accurate, both have contributed to a discursively constructed history that holds the independent video distributors entirely responsible for the events that followed, with the ushering-in of a scheme of government- sanctioned censorship that continues in Britain to this day. Through an exploration of the marketing and distribution of the video nasties, foregrounding technological, economic and aesthetic concerns, Nasty Business complicates the established history and contextualises the video nasties within the broader global landscape of an emergent home video industry. It moves beyond the explicitly social readings that have positioned the video nasties as a quintessentially British concern, instead reconsidering them as part of a broader global film industry with promotions demonstrative of wider industrial practice. And it tracks the development of the category and reveals other possible motives and benefits in the introduction of the Video Recordings Act.