Stray Cat partners with Chicago’s Oscarbate Film Collective to bring KC some Video Nasties

The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue. // Courtesy of Oscarbate Film Collective

What do The Last House on the Left, I Spit on your Grave, The Evil Dead, A Bay of Blood and Cannibal Holocaust have in common? In addition to the obvious—they’re all horror movies made between 1971 and 1981—all of these movies were either heavily censored or denied release by the British government.

Censoring or outright banning movies in wide release is typically something you’d associate with dictatorships or depictions of futuristic dystopias like Brazil or 1984. But in Britain under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher and decency advocate Mary Whitehouse, it happened enough that the prosecuted (and sometimes forcibly confiscated) movies were given a collective name: video nasties. 

Since that time, the era’s been satirized on shows like The Young Ones, immortalized in song by the iconic British punk group The Damned, and most recently was the subject of its very own horror movie, Prano Bailey-Bond’s 2021 indie film Censor. When you mention “video nasties” around certain groups of movie fans, it still gets an impassioned reaction.

“You’ll see boobs, you’ll see gore. You’ll sometimes see boobs chopped off, penises chopped off,” film programmer John Dickson, a Kansas City native now living in Chicago, says. “Most of it’s not porn-level, but it was low-budget horror that was flooded onto video shelves that got impacted.”

Dickson is part of the Oscarbate Film Collective, who are bringing three video nasties from the original list of 72 films challenged by the British government to the Stray Cat Film Center on Friday January 26 and Saturday January 27.

On deck are 1976’s The Witch Who Came from the Sea, 1981’s Bloody Moon, a 16mm print of 1974’s The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, and Ban the Sadist Videos!, a documentary about the Video Nasty era produced in 2005 by Severin Films.

Stray Cat programmer Andrew Linn says it’s worth highlighting these movies not just because of their notorious reputations, but also because the films themselves can sometimes be much more strange and nuanced than their “dangerous” categorization makes them out to be.

“I know we’re excited about seeing The Witch Who Came from the Sea because it defies your expectations of what these movies can be,” Linn says of the movie about a troubled seaside bar waitress on a revenge spree. “They can tackle subjects that are pretty taboo, but that one definitely leans more arthouse.”

The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue. // Courtesy of Oscarbate Film Collective

Seeing these films and judging them on their own merit, rather than through the lens of reactionary backlash is also a reminder of the ways censorship still exists in the UK and the US today, says Oscarbate programmer William Morris.

“There was an insane variety of movies on that original list of 72 and beyond,” Morris says. “Whether you want to call it culture wars, trying to take sex out of movies, or all this other stuff we see now, this is an example of what happens when you give someone full tilt boogie to judge whatever they want on behalf of other people, with little actual knowledge. It’s not always about being extreme, it was about a culture that said you can control everything, and all the art that was lost as a result.”

That threat still exists today, Morris, Dickson and Linn say. It’s present in school boards challenging books that include LGBTQ+ content and address the U.S.’ record on race. It’s also there in large studios and corporations self-censoring films with content they consider inappropriate—think of Disney giving Darryl Hannah CGI extensions to cover her bare bottom in Splash, or removing the suggestion of penetrative sex from a relatively mild love scene in Avatar for streaming on Disney+.

Ban the Sadist Videos! // Courtesy of Oscarbate Film Collective

“We face weird times and I don’t know where they’re gonna go,” Dickson says. “Things shock us every day. We have antitrust laws in this country, but we’re still watching all these studios become one. It just makes me think, where will this lead to when there’s not as much say in the making and distribution of movies in this country? What kind of ‘sanded down to the bone scrubbed free of all blood’ movie world are we getting close to?”

Linn says that in addition to the salacious element of Video Nasties, it’s worth remembering that moral panics around similar content were happening here around the same time, and that it’s still going on.

“The moral panic that happened around these things (in the UK) happened here too,” he says. “The censorship infrastructure is already in place, and there’s a push for it. Since we’re now so steeped in moral panics, it’s interesting to consider how they congeal and what their effects are.” 

Tickets for Stray Cat Film Center’s “Sex, Violence and Videotape” screenings are available via their website.

Ban the Sadist Videos! // Courtesy of Oscarbate Film Collective