Stephen Gerard Doheny

Just how nasty were the video nasties?

Identifying contributors of the video nasty moral panic in the 1980s

DIPLOMA THESIS

submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Magister der Philosophie

Programme: Teacher Training Programme Subject: English Subject: Geography and Economics

Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt

Evaluator

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Jörg Helbig, M.A. Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Klagenfurt, May 2019

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Affidavit

I hereby declare in lieu of an oath that
- the submitted academic paper is entirely my own work and that no auxiliary materials have been used other than those indicated,
- I have fully disclosed all assistance received from third parties during the process of writing the thesis, including any significant advice from supervisors,
- any contents taken from the works of third parties or my own works that have been included either literally or in spirit have been appropriately marked and the respective source of the information has been clearly identified with precise bibliographical references (e.g. in footnotes),
- to date, I have not submitted this paper to an examining authority either in Austria or abroad and that
- when passing on copies of the academic thesis (e.g. in bound, printed or digital form), I will ensure that each copy is fully consistent with the submitted digital version.

I understand that the digital version of the academic thesis submitted will be used for the purpose of conducting a plagiarism assessment.

I am aware that a declaration contrary to the facts will have legal consequences.

• Stephen G. Doheny “m.p.”
• Köttmannsdorf: 1^st May 2019

Dedication

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I would like to dedicate this work to my wife and children, for their support and understanding over the last six years. I would like to extend special thanks to Professor Jörg Helbig for allowing me to pursue my research interests, and for evaluating this work. I would also like to thank the professors and tutors from the faculties of English, Geography and the School of Education for guiding me through my teacher training studies.

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Table of Contents:

Affidavit / Dedication List of Abbreviations ii iv

1) Introduction………………………………………………………………………….…...…1

What is a video nasty? ........................................................... ..………...….. …1
2) The video nasty as moral panic: a theoretical approach................................... …..2 3) British Censorship: Historical repitition............................................................. …..6

3.1 3.2 3.3
The troubled birth of cinema…..…………………………………....………………..8

Lady Chatterley’s Lover ………………..…………………………………………..10

• The same rules don’t apply
• …………………………………....………………18

4) Video Violence and Children Report 1983...................................................... …..21 5) Marketing the video nasties ........................................................................... …..31

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5
SS EXPERIMENT CAMP (1976) Synopsis …………………………………………..33 CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1979) Synopsis …………………………………………..34

Go Video & Des Dolan ……………………………………………………………..35

The stunt that started it all………………………...……………………..………….41 The media gets nasty ……………………………………………………………..43

6) Mary Whitehouse........................................................................................... …..44 7) Video cover artwork: The AIDA rental experience.......................................... …..52 8) I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978) Case study & Defense……………………………………..67

8.1 Synopsis ……………………………………..…..…………………………..………... 67

8.2 History …..………………………………………………………………….….. 70

8.3 Reception ........................................................................................... ….. 73 8.4 Analysis.............................................................................................. ….. 75

8.5 No means No!: Destroying the myths of male sexual violence ................... ….. 77

8.6 Headless women ................................................................................. ….. 78 8.7 Accusing THE ACCUSED (1988)............................................................... ….. 82 8.8 North, not South: DELIVERANCE (1972) .................................................... ….. 84 8.9 I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE as Anti-cinema..................................................... ….. 84 8.10 Remakes and Sequels........................................................................ ….. 87
9) Conclusion..................................................................................................... ….. 90

Bibliography..........................................................................................................91

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List of Abbreviations

AIDA ASA
Attention, Interest, Desire, Action (marketing model) Advertising Standards Authority British Board of Film Classification (after 1984) British Video Association
BBFC BVA CARE DPP
Christian Action Research Education Director of Public Prosecutions

• Greater London Council
• GLC

• MP
• Member of Parliament

NVALA OPA PGVE TRU

National Viewer’s and Listener’s Association

Obscene Publications Act 1959 Parliamentary Group Video Enquiry Television Research Unit
VCR VRA
Video Cassette Recorder Video Recordings Act

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1. Introduction

Home video came onto the market in the late 1970s, and quickly became very popular. It was treated with the same disdain and abhorrence as literature, cinema and comics when they were first made widely available to working class audiences. The Video Recordings Act of 1984 demanded all video content be submitted to the BBFC for classification and censorship. Those who did not comply faced hefty fines and or custodial sentences. The VRA was the result of the video nasty moral panic, a panic that was nurtured by moralists and amplified by tabloid newspapers. This paper focuses its attention on the chain of events and contributors that manufactured the video nasty moral panic. It also examines historical panics in attempting to identify recurring themes and investigate why moral panics are quite common in Britain. After first defining the term video nasty, Chapter 2 considers moral panics from a theoretical perspective and identifies the video nasty era as a moral panic. Chapter 3 examines historical panics and censorship, and identifies the notion of class, and its role in moral panic production. Chapter 4 presents the people and events that contributed to the release of the Video Violence and Children report in 1983; the document that paved the way for censorship legislation to pass through the House of Commons uncontested. Chapter 5 examines how the video nasties were marketed and chronicles the exploits of Des Dolan of Go Video and the stunt that started it all. Chapter 6 is devoted to Mary Whitehouse, who was a powerhouse of British moralism in the 1970s and 80s. She campaigned relentlessly to see distributors prosecuted and video nasty titles banned. Chapter 7 applies the AIDA model of marketing to the video rental experience, which analyses the video cover artwork used to promote the video nasties, artwork that moralists found so abhorrent and depraved. Chapter 8 presents a detailed analysis and defense of I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978), perhaps the most notorious of all the video nasties. The analysis shows that some of the nasties were misunderstood and unfairly treated by critics when compared with more polished Hollywood releases. I begin by defining the term video nasty.

What is a video nasty?

I shall adopt the definition of a video nasty as defined in 2010 by Phelim O’Neill. The definition appeared in the Guardian newspaper and suggests that

“In a nutshell, [a video nasty] was most likely to be a low-budget horror film,

produced in the US or Italy, that exploited the lack of a rigorous regulatory system

for how rental video cassettes were circulated in the UK… They were everywhere,

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and the most popular (thanks to some incredibly lurid and wonderfully provocative

cover artwork), and conspicuous were the horror films” (O'Neill 2010).

Describing the home entertainment market in 1980 O’Neill continues,

“The home video market had just exploded, almost everyone, in the space of a few years, had a video recorder in their home and as far as retailers and distributors were concerned, it was frontier territory. There was no censorship, classification or regulation. Videos could be bought or rented from almost anywhere: newsagents,

garages, even butchers and barbers” (Ibid).

Video recorders went on sale in Britain in 1978 (Walker 2017, 631), and video content remained unregulated until the passing of the VRA six years later (Walker 2017, 630). Cinema releases were obliged to be submitted to the BBFC for censoring and classification, but no such requirements were in place to police video content (Ibid). This allowed distributors to release uncut versions of films that had previously been heavily edited or even rejected by the censors. It also meant that a wave of violent sexploitation and horror films that had not previously been submitted to the (BBFC) could be rented from video rental stores up and down the UK. 72 of these titles were listed by the DPP for obscenity and would become the infamous video nasties.

2. The Video Nasty era as moral panic: A theoretical approach.

This section applies a theoretical approach to the phenomenon of the video nasty scare of the early 1980s and identifies it as a moral panic. Indeed, this entire paper works towards identifying the major contributors and their motivations. This section also serves as a brief chronology of the events that led to the enactment of the VRA in 1984. The interaction and communication between moralists, public servants and the press fueled a panic seen nowhere else in Western Europe in the early days of

home video entertainment. In his paper “Are We Insane?” The “Video Nasty” Moral

Panic (2012), Julian Petley ponders as to why Britain was the only EU country (except

for Éire) to introduce “wholesale state censorship” on the medium of home video

(Petley 2012, 35). Petley attempts to answer the question by presenting the notion of a moral panic, and suggests that events prior to the enactment of the VRA

“need to be understood as a process of communication involving a defiance-

defining elite of politicians, moral entrepreneurs and censorious newspapers, a

process from which the public itself was largely absent” (Petley 2012, 35).

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Petley adopts Stanley Cohen’s (2002) definition of moral panic as a framework to

support his own thesis, that the video nasty scare in the early 1980s was the product of an orchestrated and connected chain of events. He identifies examples of the features that Cohen proposes in his definition. It shows that the British print media was a significant contributor to the video nasty panic and the legislation that was passed to combat its alleged attack on British morality. In the third revised edition of his 1972 seminal work Folk Devils and Moral Panics (2012), Stanley Cohen offers the following description of a moral panic.

“Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A

condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. Sometimes the object of the panic is quite novel and at other times it is something which has been in existence long enough, but suddenly appears in the limelight. Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten, except in folk-lore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and longlasting repercussions and might produce such changes in legal and social policy

or even in the way society conceives itself” (Cohen 2002, 1).

Petley (2012), proceeds to show how events in the early 1980s follow the path mapped

out in Cohen’s lengthy description. The “threat to societal values and interests” during

the panic was uncensored home video, which grew rapidly in popularity from the end of the 1970s (Kerekes & Slater 2000, 7). Video also posed a threat to TV and cinema, as the British box office sold 15 million fewer tickets in 1981 than it had in 1980. Moral guardians like the police and customs officers had for decades fought to keep the violent and gory imagery available on home video out of Britain (Petley 2012, 37).

The next ingredient in Cohen’s recipe for moral panic is the mass media. The

Advertising Standards Authority received complaints about how video nasties were being promoted as early as 1981 and the tabloid newspaper the Mail ran a story on the 12^th May 1982 titled The Secret Video Show, which informed the British public that

“children, well used to video recorders in school, are catching on to the fact that

their parents’ machine can give them the opportunity to watch the worst excesses of cinema sex and violence” (Petley 2012, 38).

The British tabloids were fervent in their campaign to stir public opinion and its calls

“for statutory control of the new medium” (Ibid), while the more liberal papers were

strangely silent in denouncing censorship or in their defense of home video as a form

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of entertainment. The same article also provided the perfect platform for people who

were as Cohen describes, “manning the barricades”. A concerned teacher felt that “video the gives children access to something that the parents may not be able to

control” (Ibid). The Sunday Times published a piece by Peter Chippendale titled How

High Street Horror is Invading the Home on the 23^rd of May (Martin 2007,14). This was

the first time that the term “video nasty” appeared in print. In his article Chippendale

warned an unsuspecting British public that the graphic horror found in video nasties was

“far removed from the suspense of the traditional horror film, dwelling on murder,

multiple rape, butchery, sado-masochism, mutilation of women, cannibalism and

Nazi atrocities” (McKenna 2016, 121).

Petley identifies Cohen’s “stylized and stereotypical fashion” in the way that specific

video nasty titles such as SNUFF (1976) and ISPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978) are described

in article” as “horrifyingly convincing” (Petley 2012, 39). Less than a week later, the

Express newspaper printed a story titled “This Poison Being Peddled as Home

‘Entertainment’”. The article follows Chippendale’s lead, and Petley also claims that it also introduces the next ingredient; the “socially accredited experts”, in the form of the

BBFC. The full-page article informed its readers that Board were looking into the possibility of introducing certifications for video releases (Ibid).

Petley locates Cohen’s “ways of coping” through the suggestion in the article that video

rental stores should adhere to the same control as sex shops, meaning that they would have to be granted a license from local councils. The Obscene Publication’s Squad’s way of dealing with the video nasty attack was to seize a copy of SS EXPERIMENT CAMP (1976) and send it to the DPP in a combined effort to bring prosecution charges against

the film’s distributors under provisions of the Obscene Publications Act (Petley 2012,

39-40). Prosecutions were successful, but only under section 3 of the OPA which meant that those found guilty received hefty fines. The police had hoped that the DPP would evoke section 2 of the act, meaning that successful prosecutions would lead to lengthy prison sentences (Petley 2012, 57). Someone else manning the barricades

was “moral entrepreneur” Mary Whitehouse. She became a regular feature in tabloid

articles and openly called for the firing of the DPP because of his initial tepid response to the threat of the video nasties. With ever more articles appearing in the papers, the DPP reconsidered, and decided that the films could be prosecuted under section 2, leading to nationwide seizures and prosecution proceedings. These decisions and

events are identified by Petley as the “extension of the law”, as laid out in Cohen’s

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roadmap to moral panic. Petley also opines that by prosecuting the films under Section 2 of the OPA, after originally prosecuting distributors under Section 3 demonstrates

the factor of “escalation” that Cohen lists in his definition. Such escalation needs to be

justified, and this was achieved in the same way that Cohen had observed during the Mods and Rockers clashes in the 1960s. The press escalated the panic through its rhetoric of exaggeration and continuous negative depiction of subcultures (Cohen 2002, 67).

Taking the public’s voice.

Petley contends that the position taken by the press; that they represented the opinions and concerns of the public was never validated through research. Indeed, the findings of some surveys that were conducted at the time of the panic would seem to indicate that the views and demands made by journalists did not reflect public opinion. 92% of

those questioned in a MORI poll in 1983 admitted that “they had never been offended by the contents of a pre-recorded video cassette”, while a later poll in early 1984 unearthed that 65% of respondents “were opposed to the government deciding which videos were available for home viewing” (Petley 2002, 53). The British press laid claim

to knowing and representing the mood, opinions and fears of the public during the video nasty era, a coup that Hall et al. (1978) equates to “taking the public voice”. Assuming such a position then allowed the press to further its own agenda under the guise of mirroring public sentiment (Hall et al. 1978, 63). The opinions presented by the press jolted politicians into action and adopt such opinions as their own (Petley 2012 ,54). Politically driven events do not always require public support, as was proven by events in 1983 and the uninhibited passing of the Video Recordings Bill through the British House of Commons. The bill had been proposed by an unknown backbench MP by the name of Graham Bright. The British public did not call to be heard or that their demands be met, like the press or evangelical moralists. The public, as Ericson

et al. (1987) suggests, did not belong to Cohen’s “deviance-defining elite”, and could

only follow events as they were reported in the media (Ericson et al 1987, 351). The British public and its opinions were not given any true agency during the panic, and even they had, there was no real paths of discourse or forums for debate. The TV debates that pitted defenders of the video nasties and anti-censorship sensitivities like Martin Barker against moral opportunists like Mary Whitehouse or Malcolm Muggeridge only served to give the media savvy moralists a platform to bash and accuse their articulate opponents of being evil and depraved. The VRA completes

Cohen’s checklist as it exemplifies a “changes in legal policy”.

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Based on Cohen’s definition and Petley’s observations, one could argue that the

legislation that was introduced to censor home video in 1984 was the result of a moral panic, which was realized through the combined efforts of moralists, the media and politicians. The following chapter will identify and examine historical examples of the same phenomena. This will unearth aspects of British society and culture.

3. British censorship: Historical repetition

This chapter charts notable and relevant examples of mass entertainment media censorship in Britain through the ages. In doing so, I hope to expose recurring themes and opinions that can help to explain the reactions of British politicians and moralists during the video nasty panic of the 1980s. The examples will illustrate how the class system that has existed in Britain for many hundreds of years has nurtured a belief that those in positions of wealth and power are the right people to oversee and dictate how the lower and poorer classes entertained and distracted themselves. It will also show how moral panics have been used on numerous occasions in Britain to further conservative interests.

There have been numerous occasions throughout British history where the so-called establishment have sought to censor and control the paths of access and consumption of entertainment to uneducated and working-class people. The wealthy and powerful felt that these social groups would be depraved or corrupted from exposure to content of a sexual, violent or rebellious nature, while they would remain immune. The specific demographics most traditionally cited as those most under threat have been women and the young. Politicians and wealthy influencers have repeatedly positioned themselves as pillars of morality and have censored how and even if the working classes have entertained themselves. As Enid Wistrich (1978) writes

“The desire to control the entertainment of the young, the poor, and those thought to be socially inferior (including women) has been persistently strong over the

centuries” (Wistrich 1978, 9).

In the 1690s, the founders and members of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners were concerned with the increase of lewd and disorderly behaviour as well as profanity among the young and poor people of London. They sought to stem the trend by bringing offenders before magistrates on the charge of breaking the Sabbath laws (Roberts 1983, 160). The notion of executive government was still unpopular in England at the time, as most Englishmen viewed such systems of government as

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tyrannical. This led to establishment of small and Independent policing groups and evangelical societies who took it upon themselves to police the poor and impressionable (Ibid). A later example of such an independent policing force is the Proclamation Society which was founded by William Wilberforce. Wilberforce, who a popular politician at the time, managed to convince King George III to issue a Royal Proclamation in 1787 which carried the title of For the Encouragement of Piety and