Feature
Ban this Sick Filth: A Brief History of UK Film Censorship
‘Video nasties’, tabloid scapegoats, nunchucks, a director who banned his own film, and other outrages.
An intriguing new horror film from director Prano Bailey-Bond called Censor (2021) has just been released in the UK. Set during the 1980s ‘video nasties’ moral panic, it concerns a crusading, uptight young woman working as a film censor, who’s particularly dedicated to cutting gratuitous sex and violence. Traumatised by the disappearance of her younger sister as a child, her sanity begins to unravel when she sees a horror film featuring an actress she believes might be her long-lost sibling.
Complimenting earlier metatextual horror gems with similar subject matter such as Berberian Sound Studio (2012) and Blow Out (1981), Censor raises the question of whether exposure to horrific imagery can corrupt the viewer, but largely through a satirical, nostalgic lens. The opulent, lurid style will appeal to extreme cinema connoisseurs of a certain age, who now look back on those times of censorial uncertainty with a certain smug self-satisfaction, given that they essentially won the argument. Today, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) is far more liberal, and doesn’t censor for adults unless the material in…
