Late last year I sat down with film director Jake West for a fascinating and lively discussion on the history of the ‘video nasty’ and the making of his documentary Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape, which is receiving its television debut as part of Horror Channel’s Season of the Banned on 4th November, 10.55pm.
At the time, West and his co-producer Marc Morris, had released the truly monumental Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide via their Nucleus Films company. It really can claim to be the ‘definitive’ word on the subject. That was the primary reason for our discussion which was featured on a now non-existent site. Fast forward one year and with all that’s gone on with The Human Centipede 2: [Full Sequence] and The Bunny Game, I thought it would be a great time to re-publish the interview.
Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide was a labour of love for the director and his co-producer but what we get is a brilliant dissection of British history, censorship and some good old-fashioned horror celebration. If you’re a film fan, film student or just beginning to dip your toe in the world of horror cinema, it’s more than recommended viewing – it’s essential viewing.
Cinemart: Video Nasties and your accompanying documentary work on three levels. It’s entertaining, it offers a cultural history lesson and it’s educational. Was that the intent?
West: It’s interesting because a lot of universities are requesting copies. But not at all. When we first started this … I don’t know if you know this but we released a Grindhouse trailer reel. They were popular and Marc Morris has written two books (The Art of the Nasty and Shock Horror) and he suggested it would be good to do a trailer compilation for video nasties. The more we talked about it we found out a lot of the younger horror fans didn’t actually know anything about the Video Recordings Act … they didn’t know what a video nasty was. So we decided to do a documentary along with the compilation and talk about censorship. Unlike a book you could actually see what they were talking about.
So the project grew larger as you considered the subject matter?
Talking to people, they were really interested in it so we thought ‘Hold on. Let’s do something really special’. The idea of the documentary came along and about a year later we premiered it at FrightFest. We wanted to track down people who hadn’t been interviewed before – like Martin Barker and Graham Bright. It was about telling a story that previously hadn’t been told.
Did you do the interviews yourself?
It was a two man crew. Myself and Marc Morris. The trick to doing the interviews was not to react to what they were saying. Which is different to this type of interview we’re doing now. When you’ve got someone like Graham Bright saying films are evil, you’ve got to stop yourself [from laughing]. It was important to treat each interviewee exactly the same so they could speak about how exactly they felt about it. That’s what makes the documentary interesting because it allows these speakers to say what they want. Obviously it leans towards anti-censorship but I wasn’t trying to load it. I think they make themselves look ridiculous by what they say, like Bright saying video nasties effect dogs and some of the films are real, like Snuff (1976). Those old news reports come across like a Monty Python sketch, you know, a BBC reporter saying, “earlier today MPs were watching I Spit On Your Grave’. It really happened. It seems funny now but what wasn’t funny was the outcome at the time.
So when you interviewed Graham Bright, as an example, do they still believe they were right about what the actions they took?
Absolutely. From his point of view getting a Private Member’s Bill through Parliament was a really big deal. He’s proud it is still on the statute books. From his perspective, he feels he didn’t do anything wrong. He’s somebody who has never seen a horror film since maybe the Universal Frankenstein film or Hammer. So when he saw that gore, and this is before the advent of mass communication, these films are very shocking to that generation. Graham Bright lives out in the Kent countryside in a big mansion and I don’t think he’s very much in touch with my generation of kids watching those movies.
The class argument hasn’t been presented before and it’s interesting. The idea those in authority can watch it and not be corrupted but others can’t.
There’s this extreme hypocrisy and a view that it’s all right for them to watch these things. Certainly back then there was a lot of that. They always use this excuse of protecting people. The whole media campaign and the Video Recordings Act was met with no opposition and that’s the really shocking thing.
It seems appalling, too, somebody was sent to prison for distributing a horror film.
David Hamilton Grant got sent down for distributing a horror film [Nightmares in a Damaged Brain]. He didn’t make the film, he didn’t write it, he didn’t create it but got sent to prison. It’s disgraceful and shocking. A lot video distributors and dealers lost their livelihoods and got screwed over. This moral panic became hysterical. The judge and the jury in that case were so pumped up by the media and so convinced these films were evil, nobody was willing to do anything about it.
Do you think, also, that horror outraged various groups? In the early 1980s radical feminists were attacking horror as misogynist texts.
A horror film, in many ways, is an easy target for people’s fears. I spoke with Martin Barker [lecturer interviewed in the doc] about this and the idea the films were misogynistic, and he counters they weren’t but playing against conventional views of representation. A film like I Spit On Your Grave puts the viewer into the position of viewing and experiencing misogyny but that doesn’t make it a misogynist film. The other interesting thing about I Spit On Your Grave is it’s one of the few films with a castration scene. Pretty much every male viewer of that film finds it very disturbing and female viewers for different reasons. Castration is the ultimate male fear and rape the ultimate female fear and it uses those gender specific fears … but to some extent because it’s a low budget horror film sold in a sensational way it makes it hard for critics to take seriously.
Going back to the showreel, how did you find all of those trailers?
It took about a year to get all the trailers. Marc Morris is a film archivist and has a collection of over 10,000 films and they’re all exploitation and horror. He buys trailers from collectors. We have contacts around the world and know people with private collections. About seventy per cent were easy to get and twenty per cent were hard to get and ten per cent were really hard to get. It was sheer perseverance, but we wanted to get every single trailer on there.
What were the more difficult ones to get hold of?
Some of the really difficult ones we had to find foreign language versions like The Gestapo’s Last Orgy. It’s one of those things were as soon as you find the right person the problem is solved but it’s finding the person! Some of these films on the list are not available for release any more. We had to get some off old VHS tapes so the quality – Mardi Gras Massacre – the quality was awful but it’s the best we could source.
Did you go back and watch all the films that were on the DPP list?
I’d kind of tracked all those films down over the years so I’ve seen them all. All of the really goods ones like The Evil Dead, Inferno, Tenebrae and Driller Killer, I knew those films pretty well. It was looking back at films like Don’t Go Into The Woods Alone stuff like that – movies that you’re never going to watch again [laughs] – we peeked back through them. But even somebody like Kim [Newman], he hadn’t seen Don’t Go In The Woods Alone for over thirty years. Those are the types of films where you’re just better off watching the trailer … believe me, there’s no point suffering the film [laughs].
Do you have any personal favourites from that era?
I was a teenager in the 1980s so I grew up watching those movies and amazed they were being banned. We’d have to track down third generation copies of things. One of my highlights was seeing The Evil Dead for the first time because it was very inspiring for me. It’s so creative and inventive and it made me want to make my own movies, which I did. I love the Argento films – Inferno and Tenebrae. At the same time I was watching Suspiria and Deep Red, anything I could get my hands on from Argento.
Was there anything that freaked you out?
Well some of them you watch and say ‘that was fun’ or ‘that was a good gory bit’ and then you get tense movies like Last House on the Left. I hadn’t seen it for about twenty years and I remember seeing that for the first time and I didn’t know anything about it. It’s quite a grimy and grotty film and it’s quite a challenging film and how horrible the gang is. Seeing Cannibal Holocaust for the first time and animal cruelty it’s appalling.
Some of them did pose genuine legal problems such as Cannibal Holocaust with the sensational animal killing and others outraged for using Nazi imagery. Do you understand why people reacted the way they did to that?
Of course, it’s obvious. If you look at SS Experiment Camp, it’s almost asking for it. But the thing is just because something is extreme doesn’t mean it should be banned. The Nazi films were based on prisoner of war camp films and prison films, and women in prison films. Nazis make brilliant bad guys.
Bringing in a sadistic and sexual element is quite disturbing, though.
Yes, but that’s why they’re exploitation films and are designed to prey and cash in on such things. People with a strong moral agenda are always going to look down and not ‘get’ an exploitation film, but that doesn’t mean it should be banned. But yeah, they were quite shocking.
I remember the first time seeing Cannibal Holocaust and thinking it was real. That notion didn’t last very long when applying logic but it definitely muddies the waters.
Absolutely, and the animal deaths are real. It’s interesting because VHS as a format had something about it. It made it seem dirty and forbidden. Only now do we get to see what the original prints looked like. You got all these cropped, poorly transferred movies back then.
It’s ironic now that a lot of these films advertise themselves having been banned during the 1980s and wearing their video nasty status as a badge of honour.
Absolutely. The video nasties list has become part of British culture. This list of ‘forbidden’ films is just going to make people want to see them. That’s exactly what it did. People are still curious about that list. What backfired on them was a lot of these films – with very little merit – wouldn’t have been seen without the list.
Do you think it’s a British attitude to horror films that looks down on them?
It seems in the UK we had the worst nasties scare. We’ve been playing the film around festivals in Europe. In Sweden they had a video nasties scare but not the same level. They banned four or five titles. Britain was the worst. There is this island mentality where we’re trying to protect ourselves. Only one film on the list was British. The fact that the rest are independent American and European productions … I do think there was a fear of other cultures and certainly culture on the edge of the transgressive.
Mary Whitehouse, who spearheaded the anti-film movement, says in the documentary that she didn’t need to watch any of the films to know what was in them. It’s a strange attitude. I think it shows the level hypocrisy that was around. To campaign against something you want banned and think is morally corrupting, but not watch any of the films, shows the level of hypocrisy.
What’s your own personal stance on censorship?
Personally, I’m against censorship. In terms of classification and guidance – and classification as guidance – that’s something with a place. You know, ‘this film is suitable for families and young kids’, it’s clear and obvious. I don’t think there needs to be this ‘enforceable by punishment’ rule. Where it goes wrong for me is this: films are cut at the higher age category, so you’d think it would be the films lower down that are accessible to children. As far as I know kids aren’t allowed to go and see an ‘18’ film.
Anybody over eighteen should be able to take what ever a film-maker can throw at them. People can always walk out.
Exactly. Something like A Serbian Film, which I haven’t seen but you’re going to see it [I did that very night - it's utter crap]… surely as an adult you can have the choice to go and see it. It’s entirely wrong for anybody under eighteen should see it. It tells a story and simulates its content. Whether people like it or not is up to them. As an adult I believe you should be allowed to make the choice for yourself and not be told by another group of adults whether I can see something or not. Sweden is a very interesting model because they had a nasties scare and now in that country there is no censorship for anything over the age of eighteen. In this country they don’t seem to want to advocate that level of responsibility.
Do you see the BBFC loosening and liberalising its stance in the future?
I really don’t know. You should probably try and interview somebody at the BBFC. The thing is, Martyn, when you speak to the people at the BBFC they’re nice and intelligent. Back in the mid 1980s with James Ferman and his iron rule, things got very draconian and horror films got picked on. I grew up with that. A lot of horror critics and film-makers resentment stems from that period. It was a disgraceful period where anything was cut. These days the BBFC aren’t like that but they are still following guidelines from the 1984 Video Recordings Act, so some things haven’t changed.
Did your film have to go through a stringent process given it contents extreme horror footage from that era?
It’s a very expensive process to go through the BBFC. It costs about one thousand pounds. It’s the same for independents and somebody like Warner Bros. When you look at the ratings some of the big blockbusters get – like The Dark Knight – which is a great film, and I’ve seen this a few times, they are treated differently. I’ve asked the people at the BBFC and they deny this. Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide got delayed by the senior figures because it involved works that were previously banned and things had to be signed off. As an independent film-maker and distributor we can’t afford to wait. Another thing is the BBFC doesn’t encourage independent growth or independent production – it punishes you. It may only refer to a rare group of people who make horror but it’s difficult because you’re running a business as well. That’s why indie companies went out of business in the 1980s. The Video Recordings Act wiped them out. Then the big studios decided they’d get in on the home video market. The legislation helped the studios and destroyed the indies.
Thanks for taking the time to chat. It’s been great.
Thank you.
Horror Channel’s Season of the Banned kicks off 4th November. For schedule information click on the link here: Season of the Banned schedule.
